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Listen to how men think on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Look for your children's eyes and you will discover the true magic of a forest. Find a forest. For you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch, if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Well, I'm Robert Evans. May have said that already. I don't know. Like I said, too many ************* podcasts. But this is the last spooky week episode. And and with me actually in the office right now, Maskless is a protest against the masked man, Harrison Davis. It's fine. It's fine. Garrison, I understand that, that you don't believe in health mandates, OK? We have to respect each other's differences. No, I have magic to protect myself. That's right, that's fine. You use chaos magic to protect yourself from COVID Garrison. What do you got? For me? We're doing, we're doing the first it could happen here. Daily Book episode excellent Sexy and so ******. We were looking for for spooky content for spooky week and around Halloween. And I wanted to find a book written by an unhinged like Christian writer about what they think Halloween is. And I found I found one with very, very little browsing. It took it was very quick. It took me like 5 minutes. It used to be you were too well, no, because you did grow up in the cold. You were too young to remember this being a super mainstream. I I wasn't like we had no Halloween. I was a kid. We couldn't go to treating we had like we had like we had like we had we had like a harvest party the church put on. Oh God. But like we had we. I couldn't. I didn't. The first time I went trick or treating was when I was like 12 and I moved to Portland. No, I was like 13 was the first time I I went trick or treating. Yeah, it's. I mean it used to be like it used to be something that got more mainstream play the like anti Halloween thing. Yeah. It kind of tied in with the satanic panic. I remember the early 90s. That's what this book is going to be about. Yeah, angry about it, but man, it just is like. It's it's it almost feels like homey and comforting. I know. Thinking back to that, as opposed, this book has been oddly comforting. Yeah, because it just reminds me of my childhood was like, yeah, that's just all the same stuff. Yeah, I want you. I want you to read the title and the author of this amazing book. OK, so this is wow. The cover is honestly just looks like a normal Jackal. It looks like a regular Halloween cover. Yeah, a bat into a Jackal Lantern, but it's got like spooky white smoke coming out of it. Yeah, the title is Halloween. Satan's New year. Bye, doctor. Billie dimili. It's not a real name. Is not a real name. Billy. Billy, like it's. I swear to God, listeners. BILLYE that is not. Name. And the last name is certainly not Billy. That's Billy. But the last thing was just as bad. Dimola. Yeah. DYMALLY. Dim ally. Billy Dim LED. No nonsense. Nonsense, nonsense we have. Whenever you find a Christian book written by someone with doctor in front of their first name, you know it's going to be good. You got to figure out what kind of doctor. Guess what? Guess what kind of doctor. So, first of all, for the community, maybe so. Billy dimly. The author earned a theological doctorate of ministry. In the mid 80s at the Honolulu HI extension of the of the Western Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary headquartered in Portland, OR. So that's fine. The Honolulu One headquartered the branch was in Honolulu, but the headquarters was apparently in Portland, OR in the 80s, and that makes sense. I'm not sure if it's still here, but you know, Sister cities Portland and Honolulu. I wrote at least 15 original manuscripts of her word manuscript on a wide range of biblical doctrines. And Julie is a lady, I believe so. I mean, it has she her pronouns, right. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta keep continue. I'm going to look this up. So yeah, Billy. So then the book that we were looking at is, is 1 one of her 15 manuscripts self published by Infinity Publishing? Yeah. This was in a published in 2006. So that gives us a good. That's a lady. And if that's her actual picture on the front, she just kind of looks like a looks like a white lady. Like a white lady. So yeah. So one of my favorite parts of the book so far is right when you open up to the title page, it says, you know, Halloween since you're the title of the book. And then as a brief description of what the book is, it says a systematic compilation and narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures. Oh, whoa. No, that is not her on the cover because she is not a white lady, is she not? No. That's her. Oh, she she's like a black, conservative Baptist. Yeah. She just looks like. Yeah, she looks like kind of like a judge. She does look a lot like a judge, strong judge in she doesn't judge, Judge Energy. Yeah, OK, well, I I do. I do love the systematic compilation narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures. Not actual bibers, not actual Bible scripture. Wow. Oh, God. Garrison uh, huh? You wanna guess what she has as her as her place of employment on Facebook? Well, let me thank. I I don't know. I'm gonna read it verbatim. OK. Works at in and this is all caps now. OK. The service of God. Alright. She works at in the service of. She does work at in the service of God. Yeah, who doesn't work at in the service of God, am I right? ******* incredible. Based on this book, I'm guessing she got real real into Q Anon, but that's just based on what I read. I think she may have died. Oh really? Well, her Last Post is in February of 2020. Oh well, I wonder what happened around February 2022. Now, maybe she's just not super into Facebook, but she's posting quite a lot prior to think there's a chance. No, she's not. She's actually not super. There's a decent chance. COVID gotter. Yeah, maybe she just doesn't use a lot of social media. That's fine. OK. Can you please? So yeah, I do like that she describes the book as paraphrased Bible scriptures, not actual Bible scriptures. Paraphrase and and Bible paraphrase Bible scriptures on the doctrines of good and evil, including an expose on the practice of witchcraft, magic, occultism, divination, and Satan worship. So that that is how she describes the book. Now the book is like almost. The book is 200 pages long and it is mostly the same sentence rewritten in like 12 ways. It's all saying about how good Jesus is and how. Evil Satan is and how people using magic are servants of Satan, basically. It's just that for 200 pages. And she includes like a lot of like a lot of like again paraphrased Bible scriptures about, you know, basically like really classic evangelical kind of conservative Baptist Christianity type stuff. So that's almost of the book. It's there's there's not much Halloween content in this Halloween book that doesn't surprise me. That's often the case with these weird like, yeah, it's just it's they've got some bizarre theological gripe that's only. Related to the culture war. They saw the stuff I'm like, like, they've like stuff on like Zionism and the Holy Spirit. Oh hell yeah. I bet she's got great takes on Zionism. Sacred books. Yeah, baptism, like, it's a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of just like regular kind of conservative Christian stuff. Except there is one chapter that is pure gold. It's called the Witch of Endor. Oh my. And it is wow. It is. Yeah, this is, this is the explicit on witchcraft and Halloween. I'm very excited. It's it is. It is the best part of the book. And it's like. At least like 30 pages. I'm not gonna we can't read the whole thing because honestly again it is mostly the same kind of sentences. But I have highlighted a few a few key passages from the witches of Endora to to distill out to us. So the first the first thing that first thing for when when a bill E Billy Billy Billy. Billy, Billy so and in the section called what is a witch? Is a good question, he says, which is a sorcerer, which is a Satanist, which is worship ancient false gods and practice magic. Magic is the divinely forbidden black art of bringing about the results beyond the human power by use of evil spirits. And including the devil and his demons. Magic always brings Satan's diabolical power into play. So it's it's it's really good. She she goes on. She goes on to to describe the practice of witchcraft using like a cult. Formulations, incantations, magical mutterings, peeping and chirping. Now it says it says chirping. Parenthesis. Criminal hypnosis. Parenthesis. Oh, OK. That's good. Chirping, chirping. I'm glad she Claire. That's what makes a good writer. Because when you you you. Anticipate the questions. Chirping. Ohh. Chipping criminal hipnosis. Yeah, that's great. Writer would have further explained. Is that hypnosis that is itself criminal? It does. Is that as hypnosis on a criminal? No. No. It has it. Hypnosis that makes you criminal? No, not. It does not give you any indication with no real mystery. Yeah. So. She she basically rounds up all all different types of of kind of magic and cultism into this into this banner of witchcraft. She says there's there's no distinction to be made between witchcraft and sorcery, despite the erroneous claims that sorcery is diabolical and witchcraft is creative art. Both are diabolical and devilish. Yeah, I mean, I I guess I I do agree with her that I don't feel like there's a meaningful distinction between not real craft and sorcery in that they're both things from from from your the books that you read. The kid, but. So the first thing she gets into in witchcraft I think is is a weird intro, but I guess that makes sense from like her perspective is demon possession, so this is the first. This is first like technique that she gets into demon. Demon Possession is a result of which is of richcraft incantation. In diabolical witchcraft the witch voluntarily invites the devil and his and his demon spirits who are sometimes referred to as the goddess or God of or the host of a particular names of a particular deity for each society. However, there's a difference between possession through deliberate invocation, then demon possession by demonic internal attack upon helpless and often unsuspecting suspects. Possession is often a common aftermath of certain illness, of certain forms of certain illnesses such as strokes. So oh OK, she says that the most. The one of the easiest ways to figure out if you're possessed is if you have a stroke. Also if you have, if you have epilepsy or, This is really, you know, my, my, my, my grandpa was pretty hard into demonology. There at the end. Cheese, man. And one of the fun things about this book though, is that she really tries to hammer down in all of like the biblical examples of witchcraft, which there is like a few yeah, sure, it's the Bible. There's lots of, yeah, wacky magic and ****. And she really tries to convince like her Christian readers that witchcraft is a current problem to be worried with because she is, she's kind of upset that people view it as like a fake thing. She's like, no, it's real. It's in the Bible. You have to be scared of it. The gods word authenticates the reality of witchcraft. Therefore, it is not mere superstition. So a lot of a lot of this is her trying to her trying to scare people into believing that witchcraft is actually is, is, is, is, is. A is an ongoing problem. Yeah, she she says that the familiar spirits of witches spoken of in the Bible are referred to in focus history as dwarves, fairies, trolls. I don't know what this one is. What's this? What's this? Cobalts Cobb. Know what a cobalt is? Goes I don't. Well, they're usually like a CR1 or less little monster. Little bitty reptilian things often found in dungeons if you got a low level party you want to bring them up against. I mean, Cobalts are one of the things that you could have them go up against personally. Have not encountered though, to get a little weird games. Yeah, they're they're little little little little lizard type type goblin things. Yeah, so those guys, dwarves, fairies, trolls, and other small spirits of northern folklore. They can be friendly, mischievous, or malignant in folklore. They were reported as nature spirits. This is the other thing she really hammers down on is that if you like nature, that means that you're actually a satanist. OK? That that scans, which is that does remind me of my explore nature. Hail Satan shirt, which is my favorite shirt. Yeah, that is me that you do. That is a very good shirt. It's pretty good. So she, she, she traces back the origin of magic to the fall of man at the beginning of human history. As I said in the Book of judges, is that where we got magic? That's what she says, she says. So basically the way she explains it is that, you know, like magic. And this is something I kind of agree it's like magic is the idea of like that you are kind of on your way to become God in some way. This is now wait, you believe that that we don't need to get it in terms of like, in terms of like in terms of like chaos? Magic, it's like you're trying to like increase your own ability to have power over like your own life and that's sure the idea. So what she says is that basically in the fall of of in Genesis when Eve tried to eat the tried to eat the fruit, fruit of the knowledge of the of good and evil. So this was her attention. Like this was her attempt to like gain God like power because God can see good and evil at the time. Man could only see good. So when Eve ate the fruit, she was trying to become like God was taking agency over her existence, which is. Magic and her fact of eating the fruit gave her the magic power to see good and evil, right, which is which we have now. So this is how, this is how she tracks back the origin of magic. She's a biblical. She's obviously, because, you know, she's a conservative Baptist. She is a biblical literalist. She reads the the Garden of Eden as a literal historical tale, not as like a piece of poetry or art meant to like, symbolize things in culture. Like it was obviously written as. Yeah, OK. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's scans. There's a lot of, a lot of misogyny in this book. Bill, yeah, sorry. Even from Doctor Billy. Sorry. There is a lot, especially she rails against feminism later on and there's a lot of hatred because like, EVE was the one that ate the fruit. So it's the woman's fault. Like the woman is like the tempter of man. It's always their fault. That's that's very well tread evangelical ground, although it is extra fun when it's a woman who is hating on. Yeah. And also it's easier because this this whole chapters about witches and which are typically feminine. Yeah, but she does say that there's like Wizards and warlocks, but she just kind of rubs them all together. I I searched a second ago and I couldn't find any evidence that she wrote books about Harry Potter. Hmm. So that's this was written in 2006. So, yeah, she was. From what I've read, I have not seen Harry Potter mentioned in this so far. Fascinating, because, boy, that ****** *** a lot of people who are otherwise very similar to. Yeah, it sure did. Yeah. So, yeah, let's see. She is she. She is very concerned that that Satanism and witchcraft is basically a really a really invention of paganism, and she finds this to be incredibly disturbing and tying to a whole bunch of like all like the Woo Woo spiritual stuff in the 90s is also very concerned about. She says millions are now involved in some manner of ancient magical practice and rights, ranging from walking on hot coals with no I'll effect, to booking knives through flesh without creating wounds, to reading from blind eye sockets or from sighted eyes which have been masked to magically filling decayed teeth with gold. Which I don't know. Is that is that just dentistry? What is she referring to? Yeah, that seems like just because, like, I have parents who have like gold fillings and stuff like that doesn't that's witchcraft. I don't think dentistry is witchcraft. Well. In a way that it it makes money disappear, but also it's I would, I would compare most dentistry to more like armed robbery, but sure, I haven't had great dentist experiences. We're going to get their opinions on the Irish later, so good. Oh good. Oh fantastic. Yeah, she has a lot of. I bet she's real, real punchy towards the papists, so she does break down the difference that she she sees between black magic, white magic, and what she calls a neutral magic. She says that the term black magic refers to the direct league with Satan himself, often involving an actual blood pact of allegiance, so that she thinks that the black magic is when you directly involve Satan, OK, and white magic is merely black magic in a in a. In a mask, it made me deceptively employ the names of Jesus Christ, God, the Father, and the Holy Spirit magically, along with other Bible phrases where the Irish and the Christian terminology. But this facade is covering its demonic character, so she thinks that even though they may use. So this is interesting, like she complaints here that white magic uses the names of God and Jesus and in its magic, but later on in the book she complains that no magic uses God's name. So that's a fun thing that we'll talk about in OK and then and then for neutral magic. She says the devil shrouds himself with nature. Here's referred to he is. Oh boy, he's that. That's that's her take on Wicca, huh? He's he is revered as Mother Nature and worship and adored by witches under this deluding guise. Illusion of so, OK, in neutral magic, Satan just dresses up as leaves and that's out. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. We could only get one mention in this, actually. Yeah. But she's clearly like, that's what she's talking about. When she talks about a lot of, like, she she uses these terms very loosely. She's got a lot of gradients. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of gradients. Yeah. She's a small section of magical ceremonies and symbolism and kind of actually lays out kind of how magic works in terms of like using like a like like this, like symbolic objects and incantation and like calling upon powers, which is more like traditional magic. I I find it more fun to call on fake characters because it's very silly, which is more of a more of a chaos magic. Thing is, the more silly you get, I think the more fun it is. Then she does have a nice section on initiation rights and rituals which gets into the. The really good satanic panic stuff. So she she she describes the, you know, a covin of of witches coming together to have sex with the devil. Usually make maybe in like a symbolically with like a male leader of a cult or something. But then she says when the initiation has been completed the devil worshipper takes part in a parody of the sacrament, many times bringing in the bodies of children who've whom whom they have murdered. Oh good. Yeah, that's the good ****. That's the good ****. In America alone there are over 1,000,000 missing children at any given time. Many of these children who are never found or seen again are victims of Satanically controlled perverts who do the grossest forms of evil. Of course, many more are the victims of witchcraft and incantations and other rights. Oh that's great. These children who are being stolen at an astonishingly at an astonishing rate each day, may be stolen from unbelievers homes or they may be children conceived by the witches themselves at regularly held sexual ******. The witches are that. That's an old one. That witches are having **** babies and, like, not reporting them to the government so they can kill them. Yeah, the children are often offered as sacrifice to the devil and some ceremonies which may boil the children's bodies, mix them with lobes, them substances. Or they may consume the children's bodies in the blood. Virtual parody of the Lord's Supper. Hmm. So that's fun. And I do like that this idea never went anywhere and is not A and is not an important part of the US politics now. No, no, no, of course not. Nope. Yeah. You love to hear it. That's pretty good. That is, that is, that is fun. Yeah, she she does have a small section on a Pagan music. Magic, religion and sorcery are some of the means used by the devil for the purpose of luring men away from the Christian truth, the heavy metal, punk, hip-hop and other such abuse that conflating the Western and European world. Alright, OK, Yep. No, no, yeah, I do remember when punk destroyed Christian is actually gets quite more racist. I'm not. Oh no, go for it. I'm not. I I'm like. It's counterpart of of the hypnotic trance inducing, inducing drum rhythms employed throughout the whole world by the African nations part of India. Ohh boy, through the millions which the insidious and evil message to the devil in setting them to sexual lust and Satan worship. It is incredible that in 2006 she's doing the Black people music is the devil and she is also like black which is very sad. It's incredible. Yeah, that's unfortunate. Yeah. Unfortunate would be a word for it. Yeah, well, I is is it? Is it time for an outbreak? Not looking at the clock. Yeah, it's probably about time for an ad break. Speaking of. Ooh, ooh boy. Yeah. Missing children. Yeah. Speaking of millions of missing children, yeah, maybe some of them are in these ads. We're back. Putting more children in the cauldron. Ohh, we're recording. Sorry. Anyway, back-to-back to reading this magnificent 200 page book by Doctor. Did you read all of it, Garrison? I've read the 1st 100 pages, because after that, all you need it's just the same words rewritten again and again in different in different combinations. Like it's just it's just the same stuff. Yeah, so the next section is this is, this is again. I'm skipping over a lot of stuff, but this is like the rough. This is the most fun sections of her. Stuff on magic which is we need now we have her section called Halloween, Satan's New Year. She starts by explaining which is celebrate eight major festivals or sabots each year. Halloween is the primary annual festival commemorating Satan's New Year. Yeah. She then goes on to explain that the Sabbat is a parody of the Holy Sabbath of God. Now this is actually really interesting kind of historical tidbits. So yes the words in terms of which is does come from does come from like the Sabbath yeah shabbas. And all this bunch of words, this actually probably comes from the persecution of witches being heavily tied to anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. So the the first witch hunting book was called the hammer of the witches, and it is the malleus maleficarum. Yeah. And it is large port, large portions of which are plagiarized from a previous book called Hammer of the Jews. There we go. Entire sections are copy and paste it. They just change the word Jews, to which and you really had to put the effort into plagiarism. Back then, because your hand doing this **** you're like drawings and whatnot. No, you're doing the whole thing yourself. This is also where like a lot of like the pointy hat, which stuff a lot of like the big nose with, like like like a really big nose or a green oily skin. Like all this stuff kind of comes from anti-Semitic tropes, because the persecution of Jews and the Semitism was heavily tied to the persecution of which is often are the same things. So when they would so then they would do Sabbath, they would, they would say like they're doing like a Sabbat. They're going to, they're going to. Basically do like blood libel with children with the devil which is which is which is what a lot of witches are about, like finding children and stuff, because it actually is tied to all the stuff. Now I'm not saying we have to cancel witchcraft, which is totally fine, you could do all this stuff, it is really cool. But the a lot of the origins of which hunting is tied to these anti-Semitic tropes. So anyway, she she goes to describe different like Pagan, like festivals throughout the years with like like you will and all this kind of stuff. Midsummer blah blah blah. And the last one, the 8th one is October 31st or Halloween does the she calls the the the Unholy Satanic New Year. She says that that those rights and ceremonies in which Halloween was originally observed had their origin among the druids. In the course of time there were added to them some of the rights particular to the Roman festival of. Panama, which is which presided over the harvests. November 1st among the Druids, was the beginning of the year and the Festival of the Sun God. They light fires in honor of their false God, and they believe that October 31st, the end of the old year, the Lord of Death, which she puts in a parenthesis at the Devil. Oh good, I'm really, I'm really again very appreciative of how of how clear her writing is. So the Lord of Death gathered together all the souls of the dead who had been allowed to enter the body of another human being. The belief is that the root, this belief is the root of the false. Belief in reincarnation. Now, I do not fetch Fact Check any of this, so I have no idea how how accurate these these claims are for what she views as the origin of Halloween, but I think they're pretty funny. You know, like there is Halloween, like Halloween kind of traditions are there is like stuff around this time through a lot of like old Pagan stuff like the modern notion of Halloween is pretty, pretty modern like the whole like trick or treating thing and all. Like the way we modernly think of Halloween is pretty, it's pretty new because I mean there there was of course like all Hallows Day or like All Saints Day and the eve of which other people would do shenanigans, which is what we currently have as Halloween. It's the day before All Saints Day. All Saints Day is November 1st. Like, you know, the modern notion of Halloween is not. It's not. Super old, so I'm not quite sure how tied these old harvest festivals really are to our modern Halloween. That's something I could look into later, but I just picked up this book and I'm reading right from it because that's easier. So yeah, so she views Halloween now as like as a Pagan the Pagan holiday. This Pagan festival, Halloween is broadly celebrated throughout the Christian nations as a major holiday. In America, Halloween has become a kind of Saturnalia for children. And Nathan, which the rules are suspended and children venture out to demand streets and threatened reprisals against the stingy. Yeah, OK. I mean that is a a cooler way of looking at Halloween that is a much cooler. If it were literally the Saturnalia, children would actually take the role of the parents and make decisions for the family and demand. Yeah. I mean nightmare parents would have to go to school, kids would have to go to work. That would be that would actually be an incredible. That would be great. That would be so many people would die in plane crash. It would be especially if you were enforced. Like you don't have a choice. You have to get on the plane. You're you are piloting the plane today and a bunch of other kids are getting on it to go on work trip. The kids on air traffic control, they don't know what they're doing either, forcing all of the soldiers out of the various countries we put them in. Having like the children of Special forces guys conduct raids in Namibia, it is pretty easy for a kid to use an AK. So I think it is a ARC even easier. Yeah, it would be fine. Yeah. Lot of people are not gonna have very successful heart surgeries that yeah, but it will be very funny in like a cosmic sense. Increasingly and alarmingly, this celebration is assuming dreadful expressions of evil and harmful acts are perpetuated against the children themselves in serious proportions. The treats are increasingly found to contain drugs, poisons, razor blades, needles, ground grass, and many other. Maybe she meant weed or something. Oh yeah, I didn't. I didn't even think of that. Because that's like needles and grass. Yeah, OK ohh no grass. So yeah, she she she does seem really, really, really. Thrilled with this idea that the people are giving out free drugs which man, what a dream I wish. Halloween, like Christmas, is also highly commercialized and as part of a major money making event for the merchants OK raking in at the present time second only to Christmas in that vein. Halloween is the Satanic New Year and is a celebration of the Devil and as he is using the world today to gain greater acceptance of the perversity as he continues to proclamates his doctrine of demons so that that is fun. Then she has a very small section on Old World Halloween traditions which I'm not going to read tons of because again I don't know how verify these things are, but I am going to read like and she goes on to talk about like how like the laws against witchcraft and like the in the 1600s and other she was a big fan. She was. She was. But I do. I will read just the the first sentence of the old World. Halloween traditions section. Irish traditions. Devolution. Origin. Yeah. Hear that, Irish. We're coming for you. Irish. Bring it on. Division, origin. Various methods of defining the future in Halloween were accepted as tradition. So that's really all I'm going to say. I just love the lion. Irish traditions. Devilish and orchid. Yeah. I mean, that's. I think every Irish person I know would agree with that. That's really all you gotta say? Yeah. Yeah. Oh man, it is. It is. Wow. What a what a book. It just keeps going on. She talks about like the basically like the people's different honestly, this section is not even tons about Halloween and more about different people's belief in witchcraft. So like, she goes through like all the laws against witchcraft in Britain, she goes against like she goes she she talks around the witch trials in America saying that there were witches. She doesn't talk about all the like how many of them deserved to die being. Come on, you coward. Billy. Yeah. Uh, it's, it's pretty she, she has a little bit of I I'm actually gonna read some of the stuff on on on on America. Belief in witchcraft was common to the early settlers in America, which is were charged to making Wexton images of their victims and causing their illnesses by sticking pins in the image, or making it by sticking pins in the image or making them waste away by melting the images before the fire. This belief is held by the peoples of Africa as well as other Pagan people in a in a in widely varying in widely varying civilizations and localities. The early settlers do not initiate this belief in America, but found it already to be belief in the American Indians. Populated this country. Hmm. So that that's her little section on that, which is. I don't know. #problematic. Yeah, I would. I would call that slightly problematic. I would call it slightly problem. You know what's not problematic, Garrison? The the the products and services that are gonna hopefully sell candy to the kids. We we guarantee that less than 1/3 of them are responsible for the disappearance of a million children. Million million children. That's the behind the ******** guarantee. Less than 1/3 of our sponsors are responsible. Documented too. Well, yeah. Which is making themselves much more. It's likely much more. But anyway, here's the ads. Here's the ads. Ah, we're back. We are. Alright. Bring it home, Garrison. Bring it home. So yeah, she does mention that the devil likes to withhold the fact of existence of witchcraft. She, like the devil, likes to hide it. So most people kind of live in the dark. She says, although the Imps which frolic on Halloween now are small children ****** on doors and gleefully receiving treats, rapping on doors, rapping on doors, not ****** on doors, that's a very different, very different holiday. Well, who knows, that might be Canadian things. Yeah, I don't know. That's Canadian Halloween. The night which was formally accepted as the time when witches met and demons in the form of ghosts and ghouls were likely to wander about has come to be regarded as a time of merrymaking and frolic. The majority of people are so engaged. And are unaware, they say. Tannic consultation of the Magic Oracles and the covens and Groves on this night. Covens. Cousins, I say colvins. That's not how you say it. Well, that's how I say it. You just you just got COVID on the brain. COVID COVID is what you call a coven that meets during COVID because they're not properly socially distancing. All right, all right, there we go. But basically, she thinks that basically these all of the witches and magic doors are meeting all these goals in Halloween and people trick or treating when you are unaware of this. They're St extremely concerned that children might like walk in on us thermionic and didn't get murdered. Very funny when you realize like how isolated these people are from the real world because they've never just like stepped outside during Halloween not really like especially I mean Halloween in 2006. I was 18 then so maybe I'm wrong but I think there was wasn't huge then like got kind of smaller every year. The biggest fear back then was like traffic accidents. Yeah that's always the biggest that's like the number one thing every year. Yeah thinking back on it. My parents. Wouldn't have let me be a ninja as often as they did, but I made it through. Again, it's like we're good, we're saying so many the same words. Again. That's the most books, but Halloween, Satan's new year. Halloween has a long and dark history of devilish traditions which is survived both Christianity and the science for 2000 years is to be considered the chief festival for the worship of the Devil, which begins his new year. Halloween and witchcraft are the means by which the devil seeks to reintroduce the worship of old false gods by synthesis of polytheism and feminism. Yeah, that's what Halloween is. Polytheism and feminism. Two sides of the same devil coin. I love to worship multiple gods and respect women. Just really, that is my that's my way to spend a night with my ghoul friends. Yeah, incredible. There's also a real here's a real, here's a real good quote. There is no question of the existence of modern witchcraft. It has been admitted. It has been admitted of by thousands upon thousands worldwide and growing rapidly in the Western countries, particularly America. The word of God makes it undeniably clear that witchcraft is real. It has existed at least 6000 years, and it still exists today. Oh, good. Yeah, that's good. 6000 years going good for happy 6000. I just like that she had said that. It's a little, yeah, been around for all these 6000, happy 6006, six thousand years witchcraft on, I'm guessing because it's the devil's New Year. This is also the birthday of witchcraft. I mean, also just the birthday of the world. Because if the world as we know it was, if the worth of the world as we know it was born when Eve ate the fruit and was in Adam and Eve went into the Great World. If that's like the birth of dawn, which has been here since the very beginning. It's the beginning of like the fallen world because you have to assume that they had 100 years or so beforehand. It's real unclear. This it depends on. It depends on what denomination you're in and what kind of theological viewpoint you have on whether there were people outside the garden. There is people who believe that some people just don't. That is up for debate among different congregations. Yeah, yeah. So and and and the other thing that she's really concerned with is that witchcraft is making more people have sex because she she thinks that most of witchcraft is practicing sexual ****** on quote every continent of the world. And that's what that's what that's what black mass is to her. OK. So she's she's very concerned. I mean there's are in sometimes in black masses sexual elements to them that I hope so yeah that is that it does sound much better. But she she thinks that that's another one of the main catalysts of her being fearful of of. Paganism and witchcraft is that is making more people have sex. And again she reiterates that this is just a new form of Paganism, saying that Satan's current day revival of paganism is a sure sign of Christ second coming and it's it's pretty good. And this is the section where she where she complains that magic doesn't use the Bible, even though previously she said that white magic does. Because that some some which is drawn other false religions such as the Kabbalah, Sufism or various Eastern religions but never the Holy Bible, the word of God or is employed in their beliefs or practices except in a paradoxical. Counterfeit imaginative magic rites and rituals performed in the in the covens or covens covens in the initiation of the converts and their celebrations of Halloween and other satanic sabots. So that's that's that's Reggie thinks. I mean, but honestly might be Sabbath but. I I'm pretty sure it's all like the shabbas. It's the Sabbath, it's the Sabbath. I've heard COVID and Sabbat in the stuff I've heard. Alright, so alright, alright, let's have, let's have a debate everyone, everyone at no, don't don't do that. She also claims that this is this is this is a very exciting several universities in America offer a bachelor's degree in magic which I was unaware. Oh, I would love a back I was unaware. Oh wow, because this will, this will, this will make me consider going to college now a bachelor's degree? Is that a BA or is that BS I? Like, is that, like, is it a Bachelor of Arts or of Science? It really? That's a that's a key question about how the school views magic. Magic is both in our end of science. So yeah, well, that's why I'm wondering. And she doesn't say, she doesn't say what university she claims does this. I mean, I've always wanted to open a witchcraft store, so I may go back to this one of my dreams, get a BA in or a BS in witchcraft along with my MFA. F My what's the business thing? What? They don't. I don't know. I don't fill it in with the acronym for the business degree. Whatever you get. I don't know. We. I dropped out of college. Garrison hasn't gone. Yeah, I went. I went to film school. That doesn't count, though. No, it doesn't. It absolutely does not. Yeah, and then in this last section, she really ties modern witchcraft to the rise of feminism, specifically starting in the 60s. She says the the preeminence of the goddess and witchcraft has made it attractive to some feminists in 1968, which the Women's International terrorist conspiracy from Hell grounded as a political acronym. Great acronym, yeah, Amazing was founded as a political protest group who who purportedly justified their name as Mere Jest. It is. What a what a good name, yeah, which the woman international. Quite an exciting, quite an exciting acronym, back when we could have fun and activism. That does sound amazing. Many of the members of this feminist movement are unaware of the cultural movement within the political, and many are are more and and and many more are entirely unaware of the spiritualist movement within the cultural moment. So a whole bunch of weird stuff around how witches are using political feminism to inject cultural feminism to inject cultural witchcraft into the mainstream. This is all what the goal of feminism is. So yeah, and she has this whole whole pair of called feminist, feminist witches. Feminist witchcraft is is that present the most rapidly growing segment in the witchcraft revival. And it is from the Spiritualist core at the heart of the feminist movement that the political and philosophical women's rights tenants as a whole emerge to name what? To name one such tenant, the right to abortion. Or, more correctly phrased, the might the rights to murder children not yet born. This this coincides with the which is present ritual practice of murdering children already born. So she thinks that. Portion is just a way for which is to speed up just killing more babies to immanentize the eschaton. Just speed up the ritual process. Yeah, that that is what? That is her. That's her main bomb for sure. That sounds that sounds accurate. Yeah. She doesn't just have a great section describing the different tools which is used. And and. An athlete, a phallic penis, symbol of the liberated, unbridled, unlawful sex represents the power of self will, which is pretty, pretty good. That is good, yeah. Sexual symbols are common in witchcraft, and witches are unrepressed by God's moral law in their sexuality. Their use of sex symbols is rooted in paganism. So again, she's very scared that people are having sex and enjoying it, specifically women. She's very scared that women are having sex and enjoying it, right? I mean. I hate it when the people pushing this line are themselves women, but it does. I mean, that's a huge part of the evangelical propaganda movement, yeah, see a bunch of **** Margaret Atwood wrote. You know, now she gets to describe some of the coolest parts here. A typical witches Sabbath celebration will have a skyclad parenthesis, new parenthesis which is gathered in an isolated place, a Grove of trees if possible, around an altar which holds an icon or statuary of a false. And or gods and candles. Or fire. A chalice for water or wine, a container of salt and a container for Earth. Rather than the bread and a sword or a wand, which sounds amazing to you, just have a whole bunch of naked which is in the forest around a ritual altar fire. This sounds like the best, best time ever. It does sound like a good Saturday night. This does sound like a good Saturday night. Even a Friday. Who knows? We could, we could. We can get wild. So yeah, she goes in to describe what she thinks. Magical. Rituals are and different things that she could do again, she is very concerned ritual sex is engaged in to intensify the magical power raised in the cone of power through the combined wills of the coven. Witches. How is symbolized with a code shaped hat? Seen a typical pictures of witches in literature painting? ******* kidding me? Are you ******* kidding me? It's in the book because nobody wearing one of those hats has ever gotten ******. I feel confident. Hey, I wear that hat. All right, let's let's move forward, Garrison. That's not fair. Allegedly. Let's move forward. The cone of power. Yeah, the cone of power is is is incredible after raising, and it is phallic, so it must be for *******. After the raising and release of the Cone of Power, a ritual COVID communication with cakes and wine, which the priestess or priest has consecrated by dipping into the chalice and touching the cakes with other unholy tours are passed on from a kiss from the priestess to the priest. Basically, this just sounds like a fun time. Yeah, but I I do love the cone of power, which I've not read in. Any other magic book? No, I have not ever heard of? I I've read a decent amount here her, and I've never heard of the cone of power. Yeah, that feels like pure her. That feels like somebody who's deeply sexually frustrated, seeing it's kind of shaped like * **** and being like that's gotta be a penis. Poor lady OHS. So sorry for her. Then she she has a small section on Satanism, particularly like the Iron Rand version of Satanism. Sure. So I'm not even going to get into that. Yeah, I find that boring and it doesn't matter. And and and and and she even says that these Satanists don't believe in an actual devil. A little bit more nuanced. They just use it, Lucifer as a personification of evil. So I'm not even going to bother with this section because it's just talking about the dumb Ayn Rand version of Satanism, and I don't care about that. If you like it, I mean, whatever. It has anarchistic stuff, kind of, but it's also very Randian, and it has a lot of like, not great stuff either. I don't. It's fine. It all it all is more effort than I want to put into thinking about the universe. And then I think, I think this could be, I think this is our last, our last paragraph here. Good. This section is. Titled the end of the witches. Ohh no, witches are children of the devil, the end of the witches. Sorry, the end of the witches revelry before their idolatrous altars, at their depraved spots where they eat and drink and play their gross music and sing and dance, naked and shameless. And corrupted to file themselves and desecrate God's holy Sabbath shall surely be accomplished by God who will put them. Who put them to death and cut off their souls forever? Yeah, from among his children. So that's that's the end of the witches, everybody. We're going to be dancing naked shamelessly, like having like an undeniably good time, being able to dance naked in a group with great shame, listening to gross music and singing, what a time sounds like the ideal weekend. And then and then God will put us to death. And that does sound a little bit like our last weekend, but it was very cold, so people were wearing it was too cold clothing. Yeah. So very happy with the weather that is, that is, that is most of that is most of the good parts of the book. Again, it gets 200 pages. No, it's a nice breezy read. Grab it. You know, this weekend it's only 10 bucks in Amazon. Wow, what a deal. What a steal. Yeah, and it is fun that she she does. There is one. There is one section where she, like, outlines what all she thinks like magic is like, all like, all of like the different groups. She puts them into a really nice little package. But I I don't think I can find that again. There's 200 pages and I did not mark off that section, but I think, I think we recently got the gist of the the main, main parts of this book. Again, most of it is just her talking about Jesus. Yeah that sounds right. And and and and the Christian soul. But the one which which is of indoor section is pretty good and honestly worth the read. So that is my first book report for it could happen here. All of you. Satan's New Year beloved children enjoyed this this this book and our are properly warned about the dangers of witchcraft which is coming to make your children have a pretty red time you're going to dance in the woods listening to gross music so I hope. Everyone on this Halloween danced in the woods listening to gross music. I hope those of you who climactically could did so naked. I hope none of you got hit by cars while dressed as ninjas and I I also hope that most of you weren't out trick or treating because I think the average age of our listeners is sometime in the mid 20s and that would be a little bit odd, little awkward, a little bit weird. But hey, whatever, it's your life you're now. Do your thing. Hello everyone, Garrison here just going to be adding in one quick correction for our Halloween Satan's New Year episode. So towards the end we made some assumptions about the the code of power, which were apparently incorrect. So the code of power does actually seem to be a thing inside. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year. Contract you're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out. You can switch therapists at any time when you want to be a better problem solver. Therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? He should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Ritual magic, but particularly Wicca, so I'm I'm not super familiar with Wicca. This is not this is not my system of choice, so I wasn't aware that this is actually a thing, but apparently apparently it is. It is a method for centering or directing or like raising energy. What it is. It is less tied to the witches hat though, so that part is is more made-up because I cannot find much tying the cone of power directly to like the cone shape which is hats. This is mainly an invention of of. Of Doctor Billy from at least from from what I can tell, but apologies for assuming that the kind of power was completely made-up and when in fact it is a part of Wicca. So sorry to the Wiccans and the more proper witches for that, for that, for that gross assumption on mine and Roberts part. Anyway, this wraps up our spooky week of content. I hope you had a good Halloween. This episode should be releasing on Halloween itself, so I I hope you are having or had a good time and hopefully you were able to celebrate Halloween Satan style just like it was designed to. So goodbye everybody, see you on the other side and hopefully we can do spooky week again next year. Good boy. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of W Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Pit on the podcast 9021 OMG. Join Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210. From the very beginning we get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen so they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode. You've been wondering about for decades as 90210 super fan and radio host Cincinnati sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce, reflect, and relive each moment. From Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates, you have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show, and you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 9021 OMG on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I call the Union hall, I said. It's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Doctor King. On April 4th, 1968, Doctor Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed, right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade all we found. They gone that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Doctor King. Except it wasn't the gun that killed Doctor King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen Witt. Join me, the host of eating wild broke podcasts while I eat a meal created by self-made entrepreneurs, influencers, and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official Princess of Compton, Asia, kidding, and Asia. This is the professor we're here on Eddie while broke and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to eating while broke on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast about well, mostly it's about how things are bad, but it is also sometimes about what you can do about it. And today we have two people who are in fact doing things about it. So with me, we have a prior and shanine who are part of the common humanity collective, which is a mutual aid group out of California. Clergy and hello bro. How are you doing today? Doing well. Thank you. Doing pretty good. Thank you. So yeah, we wanted to have you 2 on to talk about. Basically your mutual aid work and then also the sort of political aspect of that, because I know that's something you've been wanting to talk about that. I've heard the media coverage of it and it does not ever make it into the interviews so. Yeah, and I guess, I guess to start. So you two started doing mutual aid stuff with with this group specifically around the beginning of the pandemic as I understand it. You know what? Can you walk us through how it started and what you guys were up to? Absolutely. And I think it's interesting to trace out the different stages of this work because it's very much been a kind of evolution. So let me go back to the very, very early days, and this is really the first day of lockdown in the Bay Area where we live. I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley, and as COVID was spreading from the East Coast to the West, we knew that things would quickly get shut down in California. And there was someone in my lab, a good friend named Yvonne, and she and I just quickly realized that this pandemic was going to hit. Given the sort of crumbling public health infrastructure the poorest among us, the elderly, dispossessed, these people would be vulnerable and, as PPE, just completely disappeared from store shelves. These people, especially those living in. Cramped housing conditions. Those with essential work, those in nursing homes, just would not have access to the tools they needed to protect themselves from this disease. And in the very early days when we thought that this stuff was transmitted via services, all of the attention was focused on hand washing, hand sanitizer. The problem was you couldn't even find hand sanitizer anywhere. So here we were in our labs and, you know, our few months weren't being used. Everyone was getting sent home. And we realized that we could pull ethanol from the scientific reagent supply chains and stir up some hand sanitizer ourselves in lab and distribute it just to homeless shelters, to people who needed it in the city, etcetera. So this began as a very sort of low key, quiet under the cover. Effort and you know, we didn't have a name. We didn't even know what mutual aid was. I think we were just following our basic instincts and Fast forward a week or two and suddenly a whole lot of people got involved. We had this elaborate distribution infrastructure which started sort of self assembling. Lots of people came to find ways of getting the sanitizer to everyone who needed it, and in the meantime we realized that. As the demand was enormous, we need to come up with ways of procuring the supplies and mixing it at scales that we didn't have to turn anyone down. So we called upon lots of different labs on campus and asked them if they could do this, if they could shift some of their discretionary funds towards getting these chemicals. And you know, again, within a few weeks after that we were mixing hundreds of gallons of hand sanitizer and delivering it to absolutely everyone who needed it. My phone was just getting called nonstop. From the moment I woke up to when I went to sleep, I I was forgetting to eat. I was barely sleeping, just responding to these cries for help from all over the Bay Area. And in that time we met so many people and we figured out how to do this work efficiently and effectively, but also as the attention shifted from surface transmission to aerosol transmission. And everyone started realizing that, in fact, masks were probably the primary way in which we protect ourselves from the coronavirus. And that's when a good friend of ours, Chris, who was a PhD student and he's now a postdoc, brilliant, brilliant, creative guy, came up with ways of actually making sub Micron masks out of just supply chains that weren't getting tapped. So initially, these were shop towels. And then we started looking at nanofiber material. And he found ways of for around $0.60, making a mask that was basically the quality of an N95 mask that could be made in just a few minutes at home. And so we suddenly just integrated that whole effort into our own and started just recruiting volunteers, sharing all of our resources and this large assembly network of these little pods situated all across the Bay Area, each of them with a team lead with a little army. Battalion of assembly volunteers and dedicated drivers were just making thousands of these masks every week, which we were then distributing through the distribution infrastructure that we had sort of put together earlier on in the pandemic. And so we found ourselves, and this was still very much at a time when you couldn't even find cloth masks or surgical masks and shops, we found ourselves, astonishingly, being the primary source of this essential PPE for. 10s and 10s of thousands of people in the Bay Area. And as we recovered in the early days by the Chronicle and the LA Times, loads of people started joining the Volunteer network. We started getting donations and that was the earlier stage of what we did. And I'll pass it on to Janine to talk about that, what we did next. Yeah, so kind of as a common humanity collective was working on this project, Abrar, myself and a couple other folks started adopting kind of a democratic socialist of America or East Bay DS, a side of what was happening. And through this project, our intent was to have a little bit more political education and think really critically about how we could make this true mutual aid, which over and I have learned is really, really difficult to do actually under capitalism. And so. Because we started this project around December, so kind of the height of the pandemic, we wanted to make it accessible for people who were really COVID cautious. And so we would assemble kits of masks in a park with a couple folks outside, and then we would drive these kits to people's homes and get on zoom, and we would have a breakout room for people to learn how to make masks. People, oftentimes people who had only come to the build a couple times, started teaching new folks how to build these masks and in the other room. They're doing readings and we were reading, you know, Pennacook and Jane Mackenzie side-by-side talking about, you know, trade unions and solidarity unionism. We were reading about tenant organizing abroad. Do you wanna talk about Rosa Luxemburg a little bit? Yeah. I mean, it was an amazing thing. We were trying to sort of expand our own political consciousness and we did things like host A3 Part series, just discussing, examining. Analyzing the political theory of Rosa Luxemburg and we had huge participation, and this was at a time where, in our DSH chapter in many of the different committees, people were panicking because no one was showing up. And and yet we found an enormous number of people joining our effort in these discussions were so energetic and so enthusiastic. And, you know, this was a lonely time. It was a difficult time, and people seemed to find something in what we were doing. What do you think about that, Jenny? Yeah. And I think, you know, not only were people coming and participating, right? We had high school students, we had people who had dedicated the pandemic to reading political theory. Right. And so you have this huge breadth of knowledge. We have more liberal people joining. We have like anarchists and communists, right? Like, all in this space that are actually talking together. And what was so empowering to me was everyone felt like they could speak. We had people that were really introverted that in the beginning didn't talk at all, slowly start to open up. We had high schoolers asking really incredible. Questions, right. Like, is revolution even possible right now? And kind of getting into some of this. And I think one of the most impactful things was that we had these calls from 7 to 9 at night. And after that we had what we called late night, where folks would stay on till like 12 at night and talk to each other. And in this time of like, isolation and depression, I don't think anyone that I know at least was having a good time in December, January, February, right? People were coming together on zoom and actually staying on zoom. After what we were doing to feel some type of camaraderie, to feel like they were part of a community and we were able to actually create that space. And I think that that was something that to me was really incredible. And I think, you know, framing this also from the George Floyd protests that happened over the summer and thinking, you know more about abolition, right? Thinking more about community building. I don't think you can truly, or I can't imagine a future without the prison industrial complex that doesn't involve communities of care that doesn't involve. Giving people both the resources and the like love that they need to be able to not be pushed into situations where they have to commit crimes and also having accountability amongst each other. Not to mention, right, this work is really, really hard. People burn out like we're exhausted to be able to create a space where everyone cares for each other. We're checking in with each other where, you know, in the beginning of this virtual mask builds, I think, you know, a bra. Myself and a couple other folks were doing the majority of the work and by the end we were doing. None of it. We had, like, been able to reallocate those tasks. We had been able to develop leaders, and we had essentially organized ourselves out of a job, which to me is like the organizer's dream, right? Like, that's what you really want to see happen. And so that's kind of what was happening on the production side of the mask builds. On the distribution side, again, we're thinking how can we actually make this true mutual aid. And so we started to partner with tank tenant and neighborhood councils, which is one of the main tenant groups in the Bay Area and working with them to go to food banks, right. Places where people are generally low income, where they might not be able to have the resources to get masks. And we're distributing masks asking them are you having trouble with your rent or your landlord, right. The goal in this is to give people. The tools to organize around issues that are deeply pertinent and urgent to them, especially with an impending eviction moratorium. Right? And so. We learned a lot through this. We went to a lot of different food banks. We found, you know, some of them were places where people primarily spoke Cantonese and Mandarin. And so we, you know, used our networks again that we had created through this project, these relationships of trust to find people that spoke Mandarin and were willing to come out and talk with folks. We found people that spoke Spanish that were willing to come out and talk with folks. And we started to develop relationships at these food banks where we were able to distribute masks to people, talk to them, understand what issues they were having. And invite them to come to meetings where they could actually get their resources to try and tackle some of these issues that they're facing. Alright, you have more to add on the mask project. Yeah, I think it's worth saying that. We're all very busy. I'm a PhD student. While we were doing this work, you know, in the USA, I was teaching a class and I was doing research, and Janine is a extremely busy union organizer. And normally, you know, we'd come home after work and be absolutely exhausted, and this was very tiring. But we felt somehow energized. We felt driven to do this, and we found that lots of the other people who participated were also busy with their jobs. And yet would make time to do this. And in terms of our actual practice, in terms of trying to develop the political dimension of the distribution aspect of our mutual aid, there was a constant interplay between what we were reading and what we were practicing. So as we began working with this radical tenant organizing group tank that Janine mentioned, whose aim is to give tenants the tools to form tenant councils and tenant unions in order to use. Tools such as rent strikes to rebalance power between themselves and their landlords or real estate companies, et cetera. During that time, during our mask builds, we would then go and read articles and newspaper clippings from, you know, early 20th century when there were examples of, you know, 20 year old factory girls in lower Manhattan organizing groups of apartment buildings to go on rent strike. You know, 10,000 families in one case to go on rent strike. These incredible. Deeply inspiring stories where people suddenly became subjects of history and not merely objects. And I think part of what sustained our own work in this group was some similar feeling. And at the same time, when we were trying to imagine a future beyond capitalism, we were looking at moments when that future seemed within reach. And so we were studying. For example, Paris in 1968, which is a moment within many peoples living memory, all although not our own, and studying how it was that these protests began with the student movement and then spilled out into these massive strikes and all the sort of self activity that emerged from that. And there was such a wide, wide breadth of people who came to these builds. There were people as young as high schoolers were also much older people in their 70s and 80s and when we were having this discussion, someone who. Lived through the 60s and witnessed these things very up close. Came to talk about Paris in 1968 and shared the wealth of his own experience. And again, all of this was driving what we were actually doing with our hands, what we were doing on the streets, what we were doing at these food bank lines. And so it was very critical that everything we were reading was somehow feeding into our practice. Yeah. And I think, you know, we had over 100 people participate in these mask builds. And I think one of the things that I really took away from this is, again, people were craving that community. They were craving relationships. And people came back because they felt that in this group and that translated also as we transitioned, right. We had built a culture of friendship and of caring for each other that people wanted to continue working on this. They wanted to continue to be a part of this project as we transitioned. To building air purifiers right as the you know, vaccines became more prevalent, masks were still being worn, but to a lesser degree, and we started turning to fire season as these disasters right continue to strike with specially with climate change only getting worse and worse. One of the things that I think is really powerful about mutual aid and is really powerful about communities is that these disasters have been happening and continue to happen at a greater and greater frequency. And I think what I've learned from looking at, you know, the heat waves that recently took many lives. Across the Pacific Northwest, the really, really freezing temperatures that happened in Texas about a year ago and especially COVID is that, you know, the government, local or federal, is not stepping in to help people. Billionaires are not really stepping in to help people. It's really only communities and networks of relationships that are keeping people alive. And the only way you know that we're going to get through this is through having those relationships, through understanding where people need support. And we started to do this with the distribution of masks, right as build relationships with community members in, you know, Fruitvale in Oakland, which is not a large, not a place that many people from DSA or from tank are living currently. Right? And starting to build relationships with people that do need these resources in times of crisis, so that we know where we can plug in. And also build relationships amongst our fellow organizers so that we can support each other through these disasters. And so, as we transitioned to the air purifiers, we started, you know, thinking about everything we had learned from with the mask project and kind of. Making that even bigger and better. And how can we, you know, continue to take what we've learned and change it and turn it into something really, really incredible and. We, you know, Chris, who Abrar mentioned before, who came up with the masks, came up with a really incredible way to make air purifiers that, like, ridiculously efficient is really, really useful, especially for wildfire smoke, but also for, you know, just people with asthma. There's a lot of environmental pollution in the Bay Area, right? These things can be used year round. And we began to build these air purifiers out of, you know, box fans and HEPA filters. With a shroud, with weather stripping, right to make the air like only go through the fan to make it extremely efficient and started to think about how can we make this like community aspect even bigger. At least this is what I was thinking of because I had started to realize, right, I think the only thing that we can rely on is each other right now especially. And so we started bringing in a bunch of different groups to come to these builds. So we have, you know, East Bay D SA. We started working really closely with sunrise and developed a level of trust and reciprocity. In that relationship that has, you know, continued to be that really beneficial to us and really helpful. We met amazing people that came out. You know, they've helped fundraise for us as our funding has gotten really, really low because these air purifiers are not cheap. Those are much cheaper than commercially available. But we're, you know, giving them to folks for free because we want this to be mutual aid. And so, working with Sunrise, we're working with Asians for Black Lives Berkeley, mutual Aid Mask Oakland, who both came out to our builds, but also helped us distribute air purifiers to Reno and to places that had, you know, AQI of 500 right when fire season was so bad, when the smoke there was just, like, unlivable, we were able to work with them to distribute these air purifiers where people really needed them most. We're able to, you know, continue to work with tank. Some folks from the IWW came out. We were able to distribute these air purifiers to the Sigarette Land Trust, which is a Land Trust that is run by indigenous women and is working on essentially giving indigenous land back to indigenous people. We were able to distribute with critical resistance and amazing abolitionist groups started by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis. In Oakland, we were able to distribute. To ESRO, a group that is working with low income Chinese immigrants in San Francisco who are generally living in single family homes, right, with really bad air quality. And work with, like, all of these different groups. You know, Berkeley mutual aid. We're pulling in people from just countless networks to come and build air purifiers together. And we had, you know, an ex Black Panther talking to someone from sunrise, from San Francisco, right? Like, these just wild connections that are happening at these builds of people who are deeply political and people who are barely understanding, you know, what socialism means. That are wanting to come out and do something for their community. And through these like relationships and networks, again, like we're able to hang out after the build. People are able to like enjoy themselves. Everyone said they were having a really fun time. Even though we were like literally doing work on a Saturday, people were still like, this is so fun. We had you know, people baking bread and like fruit tarts and cheesecakes and bringing it. We had seen so we had music. It was like a very fun atmosphere and environment and despite the fact that. You know, it was physical labor and it was taxing, and a lot of times it was on hot days. People stayed for, you know, 4 hours to help do this and to do this work because they cared, because they wanted to see what they could be able to do. And they also, I think, started to build relationships. I know, you know, countless people talked to Abraham and I and had no idea. You know, we've known each other for less than a year now, and they thought we'd known each other our whole lives. And I think that really speaks right. I think that speaks so much. The the relationships that we've been able to build through this. And you know, I think Abrar and I have met countless people and have developed like an incredible community through this work that definitely helps me keep going. I would definitely not be able to continue to do this work if I couldn't you know, call Abrar up at 9:00 PM and we talked for three hours and we complain but we also talked through like what are we doing and how can it be better and how can we you know, get through this roadblock. And I saw that in countless places as we. Moved to our own distribution. So we are partnering with these organizations, but we're also doing our own distribution, which I think is like a huge experiment in how to actually do mutual aid, which is something that, you know, when we talked to the organizers in our circles, we weren't finding answers to. And so we kind of realized, like, we just have to kind of try and figure this out. But we would go out and do these distributions and afterwards, you know, have lunch with people and talk to each other like, what could we do better? What are we doing wrong? Is this mutual aid? Like these are questions we're having right after we've been standing in the sun. Talking to people for three hours, like the dedication of the people involved in this. Like Obar said, most of us are working 405060 hour weeks and yet we're dedicating constant time during the week and at least one day every weekend to either distribution or a build is incredible. I feel like incredibly honored to be able to work with the people that we've been working with. But in our distribution we started thinking about. You know, how can we invite some of these people to come to our builds? Maybe that's the reciprocity. I think true mutual aid is really about believing that the people that were distributing to can also give back to us rather than seeing them as, like, helpless. And so we continue to do some of our distributions with tank. And actually we were able to do some of these distributions in a way that helped new buildings who are just starting to form tenant councils, you know, use the air purifiers as a way to open up conversation with some of these people and say, hey, your building is being organized. Remember how bad the fire season was last year, right? Like, this is something that you can use and let's talk more about other tools that we can use coming together to really fight for changes that we can't necessarily make on our own. So that was happening and then we also decided to look at. Data around where in Oakland are asthma rates really high? Where in Oakland is air pollution really bad? And where in Oakland is it? Primarily lower income folks, right? We wanna be giving these air purifiers to people who can't that generally afford 100 to $200.00 air purifier. And so East Oakland was one of those places. And again, through this network that we had built through the mask builds, we had a connection in East Oakland, someone that had that is part of East Bay DS, right, that had done a lot of community organizing and someone that was actually able to, you know? Send out an e-mail to her neighborhood and say, hey, we have air purifiers. And so we had people posting up at her house. So, you know, we were coming into a neighborhood that was not our own, which in some ways, you know, there's a lot of complications to that. But we were also able to do it at someone's house that we knew. And our goal in this was to get people to come to our builds to make air purifiers for themselves and for their family, their community, their friends, so that we then don't have to go into those neighborhoods, right, so that they can then start to own that. Distribution and own this project and like feel an autonomy over it and so we also kind of door knocked around the neighborhood. Talking to people, about the air purifiers, about wildfire smoke, about coming out to a build, you know, about why this is really important, why we need people to engage in this project. And we distributed almost 100 air purifiers that day, I think, to folks in that community. And after that, that week. So we distributed on Sunday, and then a week later on Saturday, we would have a build. So within that week, right? We're calling everyone that we distributed to saying, hey. How is your air purifier working? Can you come out to a build? It's really, really valuable that you come out to a build so that you can make sure that your community has clean air to breathe, especially during fire season and through these calls, right? I talked to someone who lived in East Oakland for an hour, and this person just started opening up and was so touched that we had done this and basically said, you know, no one has ever cared for my community like this. No one has ever even thought about us, right? And you see, like, there are nonprofits, right? California was giving out air purifiers. Certain people like it. There's a semblance of the structure. And yet we were actually interfacing with these people who seemed to have no idea that any of this was happening. Right. They're saying, you know, no one else has been able to do this. And we're starting to form relationships and develop connections in these neighborhoods and make people feel cared for and follow up. And despite all of this work, right, no one shows up to our bill that week. And I think Obama and I both felt pretty defeated, right? Like is mutually possible. What are we doing wrong? Clearly, like class and racial barriers. Really hard to overcome in this. And you know, we were talking to our ex Black Panther friend that has continued to be a huge part of this project. And he was like you're, you know, you have to keep trying, you're doing the right things. And so we went to W Oakland again where we had a connection from our mass project. That helped us set up in front of this corner, next to a vegan cafe that serves trans POC for free and has really wonderful food. We were able to talk with them, give them air purifiers, they allowed us to kind of set up shop in front of their store. And there's also, like, a liquor store on this corner. It's like a very busy corner in W Oakland and kind of did the same thing. We're handing out air purifiers talking to people about the build, talking to people about. You know why this is important? And we're also door knocking in the neighborhood, talking to folks at their homes, asking people, you know, who needs an air purifier, right? Like, these communities generally know each other really well. And we're able to talk to people who are like, Oh my gosh, you know, like, my aunt lives over there and her kid has asthma and, like, you should go talk with her. And so we start to develop these connections and kind of map out the neighborhood. And, you know, again, we're following up, we're talking to these people on the phone. We're asking them to come out to the build. And we went out to this neighborhood again. So the second time we went out, I started to recognize people, right? And I started to be able to talk with people. And through I was kind of like door knocking while people were posted up by the liquor store and this vegan cafe. And there was like a church service going on. And I recognized one of the people there and he recognized me and we're able to talk. And he was really grateful for the work. That we were doing. And he started calling his friends over and be like, hey, you know, do you all need an air purifier? Remember how bad fire season was last year? And also, like, we should all go to this build next time. You know, we should actually be showing up and helping out and word spread so quickly. Like, these communities are so deeply connected, at least from what I've like witnessed. And that week again, right, we called everyone. We said, like, you know, we really think it's valuable for you all to come out to a build we want to give you. Like ownership and autonomy over this. In a world where I think so often you feel so little autonomy and so little power when everything feels like it's crumbling, right? To have some semblance of ownership and autonomy, to be able to do something that is immediately like, visible and real, feels really powerful. Right. When sometimes, you know, talking to elected officials is moving too slowly because disasters are happening so quickly, there is a need to balance, immediate need and system change, right? And I think you have to constantly. Or both. But, you know, we're talking to these folks. We're asking them to come to the build. And we actually had a couple people come out to our build from our distribution, people that had a really amazing time. People that, you know, said they enjoyed being there and took air purifiers back and gave them out to their friends and family and were able to say, you know, I made this, right? Like, this is something valuable. But also, I understand how it works. And I talked to one of these people, our next. Build is actually on his birthday and he was like, I really wanna come out on my birthday. I really wanna come out and like help people and do this thing that has been enjoyable and is also, like, helping people. And that to me was what's so cool that someone right, like that someone wants to come on their birthday to, like, build air purifiers on a Saturday when most of these people are, you know, working 40 to however many hours a week that they're willing to continue to even work on a Saturday, I think. Is a huge feat, and it's something that's definitely felt really, really powerful in this. Yeah, I think something that Janine brings out is really important, which is that. At every stage we've been sort of interrogating and examining the work we're doing and asking whether we are truly drawing out the full political potential of our work. So in the earlier days when we were just stirring up bats of sanitizer and getting out these masks, you know, we did a lot. And, you know, this network of volunteers comprised well over 200 people, and it was sort of consuming all of our time. But eventually we realized that, to a large degree, we were basically just acting as a stopgap measure for government austerity and for the big gaps left behind by this extremely problematic nonprofit industrial complex. And the work we were doing then, we realized was sort of susceptible to Co optation, and it didn't necessarily represent too much of a threat to capitalist hegemony and. At that point, you know, we shifted into DSA and we started bringing in a very sort of explicit political education component and started associating with an organization like tank, which is already been doing really incredible radical organizing in the Bay Area, but eventually ran up against the limits of that as well. And you know, the USA is an organization where a lot of us initially learned our politics. But you know, in its current sort of stage it's. Characterized by a strong degree in our chapter of sort of democratic centralism. And most of the effort is being put toward electoral work and reform work. And everything that we were reading about seemed to point towards the extreme limits of that form of organizing and how these forms of organizing in fact represented sometimes the more reactionary elements of the left and earlier moments in history. And we wanted to go beyond that. And so we realized that we were spending a lot of time having to just sort of defend the work that we were doing. So eventually we just decided to sort of reassert our autonomy. And as we shifted into the air purifier chapter of our work, that's what we were doing, and our inspirations are manifold. And as we were reading about these earlier moments in history, something which had an extraordinary effect on me was studying the example of the Spanish Revolution in 1936. And suddenly I was reading. About this moment in history that's been more or less erased from most of our textbooks or presented in a very kind of dishonest form. Yeah, and what these workers and peasants had done in the midst of fascist takeover was create on an enormous scale the perhaps the most egalitarian society that I've ever read about which truly represented. A sort of liberatory radical early form of anti authoritarian socialism that stands in tremendous contrast to the much uglier. Forms of so-called socialism that we've seen appear in the 20th century. And what I noticed was that this society in Spain in 1936 was absolutely replete with mutual aid. And these kind of anarchist tendencies had sort of penetrated the consciousness of many of the workers and peasants and Spain, you know, 60 years before the revolution, after Bakunin in the first international. Sent out an emissary to start spreading. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month, Mint mobile will give you the best rate. 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And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. And these ideas and they took hold like wildfire and spread across the country. Now, I think, I think one of one of the most incredible things about that story is the the the the the guy that gets sent from Italy, like from as as the representative from the ****. Yeah. He doesn't speak Spanish, right. He only speaks Italian and he still to this place, right? And he's he's. Yeah. He he's such a sort of brilliant order and and the sort of like the the the power of the ideas that he has is so strong that you know it it it it it breaks through the language barrier. And it's it's this sort of I think it's just this incredible moments that you know I think he's into a lot of what you were running into with. You know I mean we still live in a place that's you know incredibly defined by language barriers and just keep the ability to break through that becomes gives you this just incredible potential of. Power and organization. Yeah. Chris, you don't know how much it means to me to hear someone who's as familiar with this as you. Yeah. Most of the time when I talk about this, it's just total blank faces, even among my friends and comrades on the left. And unfortunately. But yeah, I mean, reading about Finelli, who didn't speak a word of Spanish and he just went, and with his wild gesticulations and his passionate rhetoric, was able to basically inspire people with the radical politics. That he came there to represent. And it somehow then took on a life of its own as kind of an extraordinary thing. And what I would do to take a time machine back and just see what this guy, you know, who slept on trains and basically lived as a tramp as he went from village to village spreading the word, what what this looked like, what was he doing? And yet these ideas took hold in a soundly, deep way, and these notions of solidarity, mutual aid, cooperation. The association existed by the time of the Spanish Revolution in 1936, so these sort of dual power counter institutions were more or less in place. And these are the things which were the the basis, the precondition for this sweeping egalitarian social revolution that then unfolded, which was unfortunately destroyed by force. But this was the sort of society that I imagined I might actually want to live in. And and and and what you see is that there is a deep element to a sort of shared consciousness that existed at that time. And it was quite an effort for people to bring that consciousness from sort of the countryside where it took hold more naturally into sort of the industrial centers, the metropolitan areas where people working in factories were, you know, found it a lot more difficult to sort of exercise these. Values, because these things are effectively bled out of them as they work on the factory floor. And that brought a whole different meaning to the work that we were doing now. And we wondered, what can we do to inculcate, to nurture this kind of consciousness among the people with whom we're interacting? As we do our mutual aid, as we do our distributions, as we hold these builds that, you know, even though we had trouble getting initially a few of the people from our distributions to show up. There were still, you know, 6070 people showing up every other weekend and now we finally started having the people that were distributing to show up, which is extraordinarily surprising and and exciting and yeah. This has been it could happen here. Join us tomorrow for Part 2 of this interview, where we'll go more in depth in the political side common humanity collectives work. Meanwhile, you can find us on Twitter at happened here. And also on Instagram at the same place. And you can find the rest of her work equals on media in the same places. What grows in the forest? Trees? Sure, no one else grows in the forest. Our imagination, our sense of wonder and our family bonds grow too, because when we disconnect from this. And connect with this, we reconnect with each other. The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times Bestseller Fair play and find your Unicorn space activists on the gender division of Labor attorney and family mediator. And I'm doctor Edina Rucar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, time out, a production of iheart podcasts, and Hello Sunshine, we're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the. Value it deserves, so take this time out with us. Listen to time out a Fair Play podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Robert Sex Reese, host of the Doctor Sex Reese show. And every episode I listen to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues. And yes, I despise every minute of it. I mean, she she made mistakes, too. She killed everyone at her wedding. But hell is real. We're all trapped here and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me. Won't you listen to the doctor sex free Show every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts? Welcome to it could happen here podcast about things falling apart and about how we can put them back together in a way better than they originally were. And today we're going to continue our interview with Jeanine and Oprah from the Common Humanity Collective. We've been talking about their work, we've been talking about the origin of the mutual aid projects, we've been talking specifically about the political aspect of their work. And how they're reading is sort of anarchist, the history of anarchist. People in Spain, and particularly vitula during the Spanish Civil War helped impact and shape the politics and work that they've been doing. One thing I wanted to sort of circle back all the way to you from the beginning was the stuff you were doing at the very beginning of the pandemic, because I think this is, I've talked about this before on here, but. You know the the the difference between a country like the US where, what, 7 hundred 750,000 people are dead? And places where that didn't happen was the degree of community mobilization. I talked about this with the Chinese example. Is that like, yeah, I mean like the reason that China. That the pandemic sort of got contained there. It wasn't because the state stepped in and was like, we're gonna do this. It was because hundreds of thousands of ordinary people just took to the streets and were like, OK, we're doing a lockdown now. And, you know, and it takes a different form in in China because, you know, there's a lot of different sort of things going on there. But that kind of mass community mobilization in the beginning of it, just like it, it didn't happen that much in the US and I think. Like you know the the world where we don't all die in the pandemic, right is is the one where the things that you all were doing happen. I mean one of the things I remember my sister is a a BIOS grad student and she was telling me about how you know so so the, the, the, you know one of the things one of the bottlenecks beginning pandemic and it's still kind of a bottleneck was was about being able to being able to do COVID tests. And, you know, Biograd students can do PCR tests like it's easy. This is, you know, this is the first thing they teach you. And that capacity just was never used. It just it was just sort of left and like sat there and rotted. And it sat there and rotted because, you know, the the actual pandemic response was run by a state that just didn't care and the bureaucracy that even when it did care was sort of, you know, didn't have this capacity to mobilize. It, you know, it's it's entire existence. It's about making sure that sort of the capacity for autonomous mobilization never happens. And I think that that was one of the, like most interesting and powerful parts of what y'all were doing was that you just did it and it just it kept spreading. Yeah. No, I think that's a really good and important point you're bringing up. And I should mention that before we started doing any of this stuff with PE, I was actually, you know, as word as, as as the the. Uh, the the fear of the pandemic started spreading, and we finally had a picture of what the US would soon look like. I remember going to a Union meeting among my fellow grad student workers and talking to some people afterwards and saying, like, hey, I don't think that we have anywhere near the kind of testing infrastructure that we're going to need to prevent the spread of this stuff. Like, why don't we just, is there any way that we can just take PCR machines and set up these little guerrilla operations? Yeah. Start testing people for free and unfortunately one of the things I noticed was that people you know were just like very confused by this idea or they had much more faith in the states ability to. Assemble these infrastructures, and I just realized that was not the way in which I was going to be able to help out. And so it's it's unfortunate, but a lot of people have, even though they have these instincts for sort of mutual aid and for this kind of autonomous organizing, this stuff lies just below the surface. Often they don't feel actually capable of it. And I think more than anything, what we've done with this project is we've created a context in an atmosphere in which things which people typically feel like they cannot do, they suddenly. Realize they can do again. It's just to come back to that idea that most of us, you know, we live our lives. We sell our labor for wages. A few people who own the means of production, you know, accumulate profits and use them to manipulate the state for their own purposes. And this has an effect on us. I mean, this has an effect on dulling our consciousness, and it's an extraordinary transformation in our social relations and our sense of our own. Individuality, when we do realize in these moments that we can be subjects. And so unfortunately my initial attempt to try to stimulate some of this activity around testing didn't work out. But yeah, it it it just presents this recurring problem, which is that people are not used to doing this kind of work. And Janine and I have found many, many times that, you know, people are willing to come and use their hands and build something for a few hours. But then what we try to do is get them involved. We say come to the meetings, you have decision making power, you can determine the trajectory of this work and that's always a very, very difficult thing to be doing now given the way that sort of people have been conditioned right now. And I think that's something which is concerning because these. Traits of subservience and sort of submission, I think are incompatible. If there were a moment of revolutionary rupture, I'm not sure that that would necessarily lead to any better sort of society. So I think this stuff is deeply, deeply important to get people involved in this kind of work. I just want to go back to one of the things you said, like you mentioned the community aspect and like those relationships. And I think that I know I've said this so many times, both in like my organizing space and even on this podcast today, but. I truly have felt like building community is one of the most powerful ways to organize. And I think so many people in leftist spaces right now see organizing as, like a place where you just do work. And I actually think that that's a really terrible way to organize. I don't think that you're gonna have people come back, right? Like, I don't think that anyone is going to feel empowered. And, you know, kind of through talking to Abrar, I've started reading this book on the free women of Spain and, like, thinking more about this also, right. And thinking about. How they're talking about community building and how they're talking about like community as believing in each other and like helping each other realize their full potential and as a way to actually find equity and equality through, like, horizontalis structures, through allowing people to reach their full potential. And I think, you know, these are some of the politics that have informed what we're doing, that have informed how we're trying to allow people to grow. And so many people have come to us and said, you know? These mask builds or these air purifier builds are like the highlight of my week or the highlight of my month, or I'm thinking about the like the way that you're structuring your distributions and thinking about how I can implement that into the work that we're doing. And I think that those things are so powerful when you're able to create these spaces again where people care for each other. And like you're saying, that goes a long way towards being able to mobilize when there are disasters, to being able to mobilize around protests, to being able to mobilize around these ruptures. Because you have solidarity that's built through relationships and that is allowing you to build power. One of the things that you trouble sort of getting at is that. You know, there's it. It's hard in a lot of ways because, yeah, I mean, the US has. And you baked into just to every single part of your life is there's going to be someone who is above you, who can order you and tell you what to do. And that's, you know, that's that's that's that's the defining characteristic of life in the United States and the 2nd defining characteristic is if you don't do what they tell you, a person with a gun shows up and either just beats you or halls you wait and slaves you. And you know that that has these enormous sort of. Psychological consequences that, you know, create creates this culture where people, you know, I mean, and this goes along with this, there's this whole descaling process that's been a sort of part of the broad art of capitalism that you are trying to reverse. But even even yeah, you know, talking, even the people who have the skills. Just don't. Sort of. They they they don't believe in their own autonomy in a way. And that and that that becomes incredibly powerful. You know, tool of of keeping people online. But when that breaks and when people start to see it, it can take time. But yeah, you know, the the. The kinds of power, the depth of the sort of organization that you build is from that is incredible. And I think this is one of the things about the Spanish example that people tend to forget, which is that, you know, OK, so the CNT, which is the sort of giant CNT FAI is the giant sort of anarchist union that's that's running a lot of this stuff. You know, they're almost completely destroyed at the over the course of the Spanish Civil War and they're, you know, disrupt the stillness, disrupt the fascists at the end, by the end of the war. You know that the fascist control Spain for about 40 years. But. Even that, you know, they they kill hundreds of thousands of people. They. Like there's there's massacres, there's you know it. It turns into literally a fascist police state. But the moments that the the moment the fascist potato chip collapses, the CNT reappears. And they even even in, you know in in 70s Spain in a place that is in a lot of ways the industrialized, they still almost overthrow the government one more time. And, you know, I mean, there's still around the sort of much reduced form to this day, but, I mean, once once once you build that kind of power, right, even, you know, even 40 years of fascist dictatorship wasn't enough to completely destroy it. It was, you know, it was still there, sort of waiting underground. And then the moment there was a rupture, reappears. This is a really important thing that you're bringing up, Chris, because I think it has a lot to do with how we just measure and talk about success on the left, what you're describing. Which, you know, Spain is typically by many people on the left described as kind of a failed experiment. Ohh, it was nice, but it ultimately failed. So let's look at Russia, you know, but some people have argued, and I think very correctly, that you can't put the genie back in the bottle one something like this happens, it's there. Those energies are there. They are not forgotten. They are not lost. And there's, you know, a very vigorous sort of left wing radical. Anarchist movement that's resonant and very sort of consistent with with the earlier movement during the 30s and I think that's that's an extraordinarily important thing to think about. We tend to measure these projects and these very sort of linear sort of status terms and we discovered especially when we were doing work in DS that a lot of people were trying to frame our own project in that way. You know, what are the demands that you're making? What are the, what pressure are you exerting? On this state. And so there's these criteria that people use to evaluate kind of the efficacy or the success of projects like these. And the Spanish example tells you that the way that these things work is in fact much more complicated and much more interesting. And that by assembling these structures, these organizations, even if at some time or another they don't necessarily exist anymore, all of those people who participated in them are transformed and the people that they interact with might. Can also be transformed. And so something like the CNT, which is, you know, an extraordinary organization, the FBI is what, you know, really gave it the kind of anarcho syndicalist content that defined the quality of that revolution, that never got lost, that never went away, even when it seems to have disappeared. And so I think we have to learn to think about success and failure, you know, as we very simplistically use these terms very, very differently. And this is something which informs our own. Work when we're asking, was this successful, was this not successful? I think that's a much more difficult and complicated question than we often make it out to be. Yeah. And and and I think there's something very specific about, you know, if we can go into sort of DSA factional politics for a little bit. But like, I think, like in some ways you see this shallowness of of a lot of the approaches that was happening in in the USA where, you know, like if if you look at a lot of how this automatically for all stuff went or a lot of how this sort of burning campaigning stuff went, right, it was. OK, you know, you have these, you have these organizations that are like a mile wide and an inch deep, and it's like, OK, they're capable of mobilizing people to vote one time, but then they lose the election. And then what? Right? They don't. They don't. They don't have, you know, there's supposed to be this whole thing of, like, Bernie being organizer in chief and this whole sort of plan to use the sort of list he developed as an organizing. It just never happened. And it didn't happen in a lot of ways because it was just sort of, they treated the whole process of building power as essentially a bureaucratic exercise. That's how many people are on this list. How many people are showing up in the state? You know and like, how many? How many doors have we knocked on? And no relationship. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, you know, and that's that's the thing you're talking about with the fact that organizing spaces have to be more than just another place you go to work, right is if all you're doing is just replicating these sort of bureaucratic things, you're going to watch them fail exactly the same way they bureaucracies do. Except, you know, you're you're you're not the American state. You're not Democratic Party. You don't have an infinite amount of money or the ability to sort of you know, you don't have the ability to call an RV to enforce what you need to do, right. You don't you don't have. You you don't have the fall back of bad methods of organizing, which is violence. And when that happens, you know and and suddenly. And and you can't confront your own failures because you're stuck in this, things just start to sort of implode. You start to lose people and you start to sort of, you know, you see this sort of stagnation and decline that I think. You know, talking about, yeah, without getting exactly too much into what's going on in East Bay, like that's where the ability to sort of, you know, you don't have the ability to call an RV to enforce what you need to do, right. You don't, you don't have. You don't have the fall back of bad methods of organizing, which is violence. And when that happens, you know and and suddenly. And and you can't confront your own failures because you're stuck in this, things just start to sort of implode. You start to lose people and you start to sort of, you know, you see this sort of stagnation and decline that I think. You know, talking about. Yeah, without getting exactly too much into what's going on in East Bay. Like that's. That's that. That's been everything I've seen out of it. Yeah. And I think to go kind of off of what Abraham was talking about, to kind of put this into terms of the work that we've been doing, right, you know, through the mask builds, as they were winding down, we weren't quite sure what our next project was. And, you know, we talked a lot about, like, how do we keep this energy going? Like, we don't want to just lose this. And I also felt, you know, a certain amount of social obligation to, you know, keep this community together that had formed during the pandemic. And so we started a book group kind of in the interim reading how Europe underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney and you know, had around 30 people show up to that. And I think as you know you're talking about the importance of once you know these relationships are formed, once these ideologies start to percolate that they don't just go away, right. These people that we, you know, brought into DS A and a lot of ways, East Bay, DS A came to join this book group and later came to join the air purifier. Project, despite the fact that it was more outside of DS, a a lot of these people, because of, you know, what we had built and what we had created, continued to be such a huge part and take on incredible leadership roles and, you know, facilitate this project in a way that it would not at all look like what it does without, you know, these people dedicating so much of their time and energy to this project kind of throughout the process. Yeah. And Chris, going back to what you were saying earlier, I think. I I've I've seen a very interesting. Ah, kind of reflection. Come out of some of these organizations and you see these different splits and sort of. Wings developing. But yeah, I mean, I, Janine is a very sort of organic radical and revolutionary who I've learned an enormous amount from. But I think my own trajectory was much more characteristic of what you described earlier, which is that, you know, I'd put all my eggs in this basket. I'd thought, OK, Bernie Sanders, like, that's that is, that is the, that is the beginning of how we undergo a sort of democratic socialist transformation and then, you know, in a few snaps of the finger even though I had spent. Just like hundreds of hours just knocking doors and promising all these things to people who might, you know, vote for him at their door and and all this stuff, that and and and just sort of regurgitating all these slogans and and talking, you know, rapturously about these welfare programs. I saw all of that dissolved in a moment, and I realized that I didn't leave anything behind. And there was, you know, in DSA and. Our chapter, you saw that there was a large group of people who just wanted to keep that flame burning and just say, we'll do better next time, you know, we'll do more work at the local level to elect representatives. But then there was another group of people. It was much more disillusioned and really started wondering, is this what we should be doing? Or at least is this all that we should be doing? And you see the same thing coming out of a group like Sunrise, which whose primary sort of mandate is to just put pressure onto. Congress to urge the necessity of a green New Deal or whatever. And nevertheless, out of sunrise we've met people who, after the George Floyd protests after the dissolution of the Bernie campaign, have been LED down the same radical path as as some of us found ourselves traveling in in East Bay DSA. And they're the ones who've now come to help our project and, you know, using whatever autonomy they have at the sort of. Hub level in sunrise because even though it's an organization with sort of paid staff and something of this bureaucracy, right now in this moment, the individual little local hubs actually have a surprising amount of autonomy. And I really hope they're going to fight for it, protect that autonomy. So they've been able to use that autonomy to actually put a lot of effort toward raise money, thousands of dollars for our work at CHC and come to our organizer meetings, become a part of the effort and urge upon their own. Friends and Co organizers and and people they know in sunrise to shift the direction of their work, of their branches towards doing more work like this. So there are these kind of interesting different splinter rings that you see happening, which give me some hope that we're not just going to keep running the same tape over and over again. So one of the other interviews we did on this show was with a bunch of people who were working with the. Basically this giant affronted lanta to stop this like. Just atrocious, sort of. Destroy this destruction of a bunch of forests to create this like weird teaching cops how to do counterterrorism enormous Academy thing that's being funded by a bunch of the local corporations in Atlanta and they were describing, you know they they they didn't talk about sort of the exact same process solution. But you know you saw there were like you know one of the people with their was from sunrise and they were also talking about how they pulled together this just like enormous coalition of community groups that was you know and like their their initial. What was the score? Trying to pressure the City Council to stopping the into, you know, to not approving it and that doesn't work. But you know it. You know some some of the other groups that were that were involved in this are talking about like, OK well you know, they're running is like if this fails we're going to stop it ourselves. And I think that pivot right is one of the most crucial things that is happening right now because. You know, OK, if you, if you know, if you, if you, you, you, you pull out your, like pull your policy like policy space diagrams, right like it's it's the United States the the policy that's enacted is the one that is is the policy that's decided by the 60th senator. And it's like, OK, so, you know, even even even if you're gonna try to do an electoral thing right, you need, you need 60 votes in the Senate. There is one arguably socialist senator. And we've never elected another one. So, you know, and you start looking at this, right, it's like, OK, like, you know, we we elect like 2. Maybe 3 socialists in in the House every year and if you know, if you continue at the same rate. They'll be like, what, like, like 200 years before we have a majority there. And it's like, yeah, you know, at a certain point it's like, yeah, I mean, we're like, we're not going to be around because we'll be dead. But like most of most, most of the stuff on Earth will also not be around because it will have been obliterated, climate change there, you know? And at some point you have to get to. We're going to have to do it ourselves because no one, no one else is going to do it for us. And I think the the work you 2 have been doing is just incredible. It's just an incredible example of how that can actually happen and what, what that looks like. Thank you. Yeah. I think that it is so important. And I think that that's one of the reasons that to me, it was also so important to get all of these groups at these air purifier bills because I think oftentimes organizing is so siloed and it really frustrates me and people seem very like loyal. At least I found this in East Bay DSA to like their particular organization. Yeah. Any other organization they don't even really wanna talk about or they don't even know still exists. Yep. Yep. And to me, like, if we can give people the tools to organize, I don't care who they're organizing. Yeah, but if we can also have these groups communicate with each other, right? Like, different groups are doing exactly the same thing, right? We have the ecosocialist group in the USA, right? You have sunrise, you have the IWW. And then you have the Labor Committee of DSA. And it's like, sometimes there is cross communication, right? But to me, it never feels like it's quite enough. It never feels like we're really all working on this or we're really all in it together. And I think we really should be because, like, you're saying, like, there's kind of a ticking clock. Yeah. We only have a certain amount of time to actually make the changes that we want to see. And when we're not willing to actually work with each other and communicate with each other, things are not going to happen as quickly. Yeah. And so being able to have a table of people assembling. Purifiers from DS, a sunrise tank. Right. And they're all talking about the organizing work that they're doing and sharing stories and strategies so that we're not all constantly reinventing the wheel. That actually working together on this, I think, is so, so valuable. And this is something that we've seen. You know, one of our friends who's helping lead one of the tank locals, has come to a number of our events and was telling us how he's actually tried to bring things that he's seeing that we're doing into his own local. And we've heard this. And other contexts as well. So things spread. And that's, I think a really important thing that you know, especially because of Janine's, you know, just just. Attempts to try to get all these groups together into one place, to communicate, to build relationships. We're now seeing what we've built sort of emanating elsewhere. And we're also learning a lot from all these different people and groups who come to our builds and then become organizers in the effort. And, you know, to mention Someone Like You know, Gerald, Janine referred to earlier, who is this? Wonderful. Cantankerous. X Black Panther, you know, who has such an enormous history of experience. For him to give us that historical perspective for everything that we're doing has been an enormous boost of of confidence. And it's allowed us to focus. And, you know, just to reiterate what she said earlier, we were really depressed when we went out and we were talking to people in W Oakland and East Oakland, and everyone was telling us we're gonna come, yeah, we'll show up, we'll be there. And then, you know, while many other people showed up from sunrise, DSCH elsewhere. None of those people showed up. And we said, Gerald, they're not coming, what's going on? And he said, you know, keep going. Yeah, keep trying. Keep doing it. Do not give up. Do not judge from that one experience. This is really hard work. And these people have had the door shut on them over and over and over again and they're tired and it's the weekend, but you keep doing it and they will come. And then the next time they came, we may not have gone there again had it not been for Gerald bringing in this. Enormous breadth of experience to share with us, you know, at the end of our previous build. There, there's this, there's this quote that I remember from Ohgi freak. It was, it was one of the one of the people who been heavily involved in the Egyptian Revolution 2011. Had this quote he was talking about, you know, I would be doing this for decades, right. And she's like, yeah, because you have a protest and if, if, if 100, if if 800 people show up, you're happy. And if 100 people show up, you're depressed. And then one day 800,000 people show up and you kind of just forgot that could happen. And yeah, I mean that that is something that, you know, yeah, like organizing is not easy. They're going to spend a lot of time. Like not winning. You spend a lot of time feeling like you're barely treading water. There's gonna be a lot of time where you know nothing works and everything seems to be falling apart. But. You know, if you keep pushing. On 800,000 people show up and, you know, and suddenly the regime is like taking is like, you know, trying to catch planes out of the country. And yeah, and, you know, you get to that, that Clr James line about how the ruling class is not defeated until it's really, until it's running for its lives. But, you know, they do run for their lives. This is the thing that happens. Yeah. And, you know, if if we do this together, we can get there totally. And I think, you know, what Abra is saying is so true. And we also, you know, in doing these distributions, talk to people and I literally would say, like, what will get people to show up right there? Yeah. It's kind of like honesty in these conversations of like, you know, this is what we're trying to do. Like, there's a reciprocal relationship here. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope. There isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant family start at 2 lines. 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I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break our handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com, that's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart this fall on revisionist history. Saying that we haven't talked about or or that I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant. You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Again, like, help us understand also, like, what we need to do in order to make sure that the reciprocal relationship is actually realized and actually happening. And I think that that was kind of an exciting moment of, like, having people have some autonomy and like, say, and like, you know, they know this community better than we do, right? They know, like, how people are going to show up and how maybe they won't. But Chris, just to bring it back to what you were saying, I think, describing the kind of nonlinear trajectory. Of, uh, popular movements in history is something that we try to keep always in our minds things may begin small things may seem small. Even when you study the examples in Spain of sort of the groups of people who formed sort of the early FBI who were just sort of discussing these ideas around the fire before they tried to sort of infiltrate the CNT. And then this became the sort of predominant mood and sort of ideology that that that that characterized the CNT. Which then, you know, spread out and sort of characterize the Spanish revolution at large and massive numbers. Millions of people, you know, and and and just seeing what happened with the George Floyd protests and studying the examples of, you know, Paris in 1968, where it at first just seems like small groups of students. And then, you know, just a few days and weeks later, you know, there's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of workers, you know, who are out literally just pulling out cobblestones. On the street, you know, up against the police and and the way that these things happen is very unpredictable and I think that's also a very important thing to keep in mind as we are trying to evaluate, you know, what we're doing in a given moment. Yeah, I think, I think, I think that's that's that's a very good note to end on. It's. You know, every the, the, the, the, the, the struggle we have embarked in is an incredibly difficult one, and we're not going to know how it ends. For a long, long time, but that doesn't. Yeah, you know, that doesn't necessarily means it ends badly. And the kind of resiliency we can build is incredibly deep and incredibly powerful. OK, plugs time. Where do you two want people to go? What do you want people to know? And yeah, we can we can link stuff if you want to send it to us in the in the chat chat, we can link stuff. We can we can link stuff in the description of this episode. This is why we have editors. Thank you, Daniel. Don't worry. I know it should be. Yeah, I think definitely like our social media. So Twitter and Instagram is see humanity, see for folks to be able to donate to visit our website, to be able to plug in if they are in the Bay Area and want to get involved and they can find ways to do that through those social media channels, you know, they can message us and then our fundraiser, Abra. I don't know if we should just send the link or what. The best way to do that is if you go to commonhumanitycollective.org. There's a donate button which leads to the fundraiser, so you can find it there also. Also, if you go there, you can see how they you can see instructions how to make the fans, and they are so cool. Like they're awesome. It's sweet. It's so go do that too, because it's sick. And there's also instructions for how you can make them as well. And we hope people do this elsewhere. Please reach out to us. We want to not be the only ones doing this. And so This is why we've tried to just put everything online so that others can replicate this model. And This is why we're coming on a show like this and going into so much detail, into our history, just so that, you know, we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel. I think, you know, a bar. And I have learned so much from this project and a lot of it really did feel like reinventing the wheel, which is unfortunate because I know that you know. Actually, it has been done elsewhere. But with the organizers that we were talking to, a lot of the things that we were doing, we were having to kind of start from scratch. And at least my goal is, like, we're both very accessible people. Like if there are questions, you know, to be able to reach out so that we can, you know, explain our experience to other folks and talk through, you know, our relationship with Sunrise started because they heard about the mutual aid work that we were doing and they said we want to do that also. And we're like, great. And, you know, Abrar, our Co organizer, Joe and I and this woman from Sunrise met in a. Heart and then eat dinner and just talked about mutilate. Hell yeah. You know, the pitfalls that it happened and what went well and how we could do it in the future. And then, like, this beautiful collaboration began like Oprah was talking about. So I think, you know, we're, we're really happy to talk about where things have gone awry and what we've learned from this project and and thankfully at this point too, like what successes we've had. Yeah. So, yeah, go, everyone go, go, go. Go find them. Go out into communities. Go do this themselves and. Yeah. Good. Go, go, go. Get us another Spanish revolution. We need another one. Yeah. Thank you. Thank thank you to you so much for joining us. I said agree, Chris, this has been such an huge pleasure for me too, talking to you. We've, we've been covered by a lot of places, but never quite like, yeah, just thank you so much for doing this and thank you, yeah. Such an honor to be here and so much fun to talk. Basically. Everyone get an inside look at what goes on in the mind of men from the men themselves. It's real talk straight from the source. How men Think podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out. It's going to be fun, informative and probably. A bit scary at times because we're literally going inside the minds of men. As much as we like to think all men are the same, they're actually very different. Each week, a celebrity guest host provides honest advice in his area of expertise. When I agreed to do this reboot, I had a few conditions. No sugar coating, no mind games, and absolutely no mansplaining. Men are hard enough to understand without the mind games. Listen to how men think on the iHeartRadio. App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When PT Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to grim and mild presents an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the Always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American sideshow. So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who are at the center of it all. In a place where spectacle was king, we will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye, so step right up and get in line. Listen to grim and male presents now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at grim and mild.com/presents. Hey, lethal listeners. Tig. Here. Last season on Lethal lit, you might remember I came to Hollow falls on a mission, clearing my Aunt Beth's name and making sure justice was finally served. But I hadn't counted on a rash of new murders tearing apart the town. My mission put myself and my friends in danger, though it wasn't all bad. I'm going to be real with you, tig. I like you, but now all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm going to win. I'm Tig Torres and this is lethal lit. Catch up on season one of the hit Murder Mystery podcast, Lethal Lit A tag, Torres mystery out now and then TuneIn for all new thrills in Season 2, dropping weekly starting February 9. Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to lethal lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's critical? My race theories. Well, all right, that's not a great introduction, but it's not a great time in America. I'm Robert Evans. This is it could happen here with me tonight as often, but not always is is is Garrison Davis and our good friend Christopher Wong. We're here to talk about a bunch of stuff. Largely we're talking about the increasing and escalating attacks on school boards and attempts to take over and dominate school boards by far right activists. And a lot of this is centered around critical race theory, a lot of it centered around vaccine mandates. It all kind of blends together like a good gumbo or like fascist syncretism. One of the things I I would say that's that's kind of most relevant. Right now, as we're recording this, I don't think the race has been officially called. But it's become increasingly obvious that Terry McAuliffe has lost his reelection bid. And the new governor of Virginia will be a Republican who, among other things, as like promised and based a huge amount of his campaign on banning critical race theory and specifically like banning books and **** from being taught in Virginia schools. And this is all. The result of a pretty far reaching and and complex and honestly pretty pretty scary campaign. And we're going to talk about that tonight. Garrison, do you want to do you want to take it from here? Yeah. Yeah, I'll do a little bit. Then we can move over to Telegram. But yeah, you know, like Getty Lee of this. So so this is your drum solo time. Yeah, we, we decided we needed to do an episode on this sooner than later. When? A few weeks ago. A large number of of of of anti VAX and anti mask protesters took over a school board meeting in Portland. And the reason why that is special in and of itself because this has been happening across the country for a long time. But that but the fact that they were able to overwhelm and shut down an entire school board meeting with hundreds of people like invading this building and shutting this down with just the sheer amount of like power that the people had there was was. It's notable because it's like it's it's a liberal. City, right. That's generally how people view it as, and we're used to this happening, you know, more like Southern States and states that are more like overwhelmingly conservative. But when like a Portland school board meeting get shut down, people were like, oh, wow, this is like extra important because this is showing that it's not, this isn't isolated to like, quote UN quote, red states, right. This can, this can spread out everywhere now, you know, with Portland it was it was a mix of like hippie types. Who are like anti VAX, but there was a good deal of like actual proud boys there as well? Yes. And that was partly organized through an organization run by the Bundys and there were some direct ties and they they helped to advertise it. So it's there's a lot of, I mean one of the things that was so unsettling is that a lot of these people were not Portland residents, but they were showing up and were able to effectively like take over and dominate a Portland school board meeting in part because law enforcement is never ever willing to do. I think again, yeah, there's, there's a, there's a lot of a lot of points here. So like yeah, one of it being is like these like these big mobs are definitely able to benefit from being you know, white, mostly middle class like parents and stuff or maybe not, maybe not even parents can just be white middle class, which means they can like storm buildings and and shut stuff down without any real consequence because police aren't police and security aren't really going to get involved that much and the like the libs are not going to like really be pushing back on this in any kind of. No, they'll just make fun of these people if they misspell something on a sign. Yeah. So, like, basically the idea for this episode is we want to talk about why and how school boards have become kind of the new front lines for pushing far right stuff into the cultural zeitgeist. Because they've really become the new, the new, the new like space that people on the right are able to push things that are that are more, that are more extreme and push things that are going to, you know. Hurt, you know, kids, mostly. So looking for this, we put together a decent amount of stuff from organizing chats for how basically the right is talking about these things and how trying to organize it. And one really interesting kind of thing of note will come up later in the telegram stuff. Is that in? I think it was. When was it? It was late September. The National School board associations like the the the National School Board Union put in a request for federal assistance to stop ongoing. Threats and acts of violence against school boards like meeting members and people present at school boards because this has been ramping up this this was happening the last last school season as well. But really the past few months the the prevalence and the number of these types of like mobs based overtaking these school boards has become so much more common that the school board union put in like some like a letter directly to the president saying hey we kind of need help here. So it's. It's not just, it's. This is. This is a problem that's recognized. Widely, even among people like on school boards because, yeah, they're getting, like, harassed, they're getting death threats. This is becoming, like, unsafe to hold school board meetings and whether or not you like our modern school system or not, the the, the resulting effect of this is that it's going to be hurting like kids and like help, like it's good, whether it be through, like, COVID, whether it be through teaching them racist like curriculums or whether it be to, you know, making trans kids make their lives a whole lot harder, right? All of this kind of stuff is going to be worse by this happening, so it is something definitely worth caring about. Yeah, it it's worth caring about all like it. It's clearly an attempt in order to to to arrest the the. Kind of progressive tilt that that society has gone through all of this is is a reaction both to, I mean the the religious right was initially more than anything a reaction to desegregation and the women's liberation movement. And what we're seeing now is a reaction to primarily the gains that LGBT people have made in the last like 20 years, including the legalization of gay marriage. And so the ultimate goal of all of this is to stop progress towards racial justice, to rollback. OK, rights to enshrine white supremacy using violence. And that's why, that's why all of these different school board meetings, like the the threat of violence from these people is a constant factor. There's regular discussion of it. There's like, I mean, that's why the proud boys are showing up is is to be a a like is to be a death squad, you know, a little precursor Death Squad. They're not quite willing to start, start pulling triggers yet, but they want people to know that it's possible. They want to scare people. Away from getting involved in local politics unless they adhere to a very specific far right political ideology working because a lot of these school boards are getting these things are just getting shut down like they just can't have them in person or sometimes on at all because they'll just they'll like Zumba like it's not like they're just shutting down so they cannot take place or school by members are afraid to go out in public because these people are are going to hurt them. And this is like. A lot of people involved in this are maybe not themselves like proud boys, like they're not super, like they're individually are more kind of regular Republicans in these states. But the reason why it gets so extreme and accelerates so quickly is mostly because of how these organizing efforts take place, and also because of stuff like Fox News and Newsmax and own it and ON like pushing people further right the past few years. But like specifically the the method of organizing on apps like Telegram and Facebook groups, this, this is this is the thing on the Internet, but like it. It rewards accelerationism it it rewards the most extreme takes. Those are ones get shared the most. So even if you know this is just some mom in her 40s who's not a proud boy by any means, she's she's still poses a threat in this, in this way because she's poo boosting this same rhetoric. And as part of these same organizing channels that are full of, like, actual fascists, there's a decent amount of very popular posts from very popular channels I pulled. That talks about the Jews in the school boards, and we'll get to that kind of stuff shortly. So there, Robert, do you want to start on the telegram with the the, the whole, the whole school board telegram channel that is popped up? By no means the most popular telegram channel for organizing, but it is specifically dedicated to school boards. And because of how Telegram works, this channel gets shared around a lot in other much bigger channels. Yeah, and and just so you know, so the way Telegram works, if you're a decent person and you don't live in a country where telegram is a legitimately good choice for you, there's some areas where it's perfectly normal social media network, but for the most part, in the United States, it's used by fascists and weirdos. So if you're fortunate enough to not use telegram, the way it works is you have open groups and closed groups. Open groups are anyone can view them. You don't expose yourself by looking at them and people. Largely just kind of post images, memes, videos and then can comment on them. And a lot of what's posted in any given telegram channel is shared from another telegram channel. So for people like Garrison and I who research extremism, one of the uses of telegram is that by looking at what's being shared in one group from other groups, you can actually start to build networks and see, oh, there's affinity between these two groups because this group may claim that they're just concerned conservatives, but they're sharing all of this, all of this content from this far right. You know, Pepe group that's also sharing a lot of neo-Nazi content and you can see there's a lot of affinity between. So the other thing that happens is that these channels that are getting big and beautiful and are being used for this kind of like right wing organizing who present themselves as more just like regular conservative channels, if you. I've been in this channel for like years at this point. And this channel used to be a like proud Boy channel. They just changed their name. Like it's like that happens all the time where a lot of the big organizing channels used to be like openly violent. Organizing, like for different mobs to go beat up people and now they've rebranded to make them appeal more to like just regular Trump voters. Yeah, that's the other thing that happens all the time. And one of the main channels that we're talking about today is, is one of these one of these channels that used to be a proud boy thing and is now just kind of right wing organizing a general. Yeah, and it's, I don't know, I'm just gonna get into it. So actually, you know what I'm going to get into before I start talking about fascists on Telegram? Trying to destroy the concept of democracy. You know what else is trying to destroy the concept of democracy? That's right, Chris. Products and services. That's right. Oh my God, we are just having a great time here. So let's talk about stand for students, which is a the Telegram channel that Garrison pointed out to me and I spent more time than I really wanted to. Yeah, that's never, never, never a good idea. So the stuff in here, this is #1 on the surface, a much more moderate group. These people are not ranting about, like, Jews destroying civilization or the need to like. Execute, uh, black people or something like that. The stuff in here runs the gamut from like one of the first things I found was a clip from a Jesse Ventura wrestler Predator star, and the former governor once had a conspiracy TV show. There's a popular clip in anti vaccine circles from it where he's talking with Alex Jones about the Bilderberg group and stuff. So I found that in there, which is like pretty garden variety, like early 2000s conspiracy nonsense. Definitely like, Oh yeah, these are like older people like I don't think quite mostly boomers. Definitely a Gen X and stuff like folks who were in like their 40s and 50s. Uh, this is the kind of **** that they would have been like exposed to in their late 20s and whatnot. One of the posters I found, uh, commenting on that video said quote aired on TV in 2009 about a plan for depopulation through a virus and injections. Too much of a coincidence, and another responded to this. I was never a huge Alex Jones fan, but he was right all along. My kids were born in the early 80s and I refused their vaxes way back then. Unfortunately, one of them is now a late 30s. CNN jabbed zombie and has infected my grandkids with this inspiring experimental treatment. I'm done, which is. Silly, but it also keeps you in like these are it's it's what you see a lot with queuing on. Right. It's these folks who are that they're getting brought in on to telegram. Yeah, it's great. It's terrible that this person, this lady who has to be what, in her fifties, 60s? Yeah, but my parents age. So Boomer is on Telegram, which two years ago even was the only Americans who were thought would find were like extremely online Nazi weirdos. Yeah, I remember doing. Like old trainings, like, yeah, it was like over over two years ago and Telegram was nowhere near this prevalent for like regular organizing. And this is a result of of the D platforming of folks in the wake of the capital attack. But anyway, we don't need to get too much into that right now. So I want to talk a little bit more about some of the things folks are sharing in this in this channel, which is again kind of like, I'm going to guess everyone here is kind of late 30s to maybe 60s, fifties, 60s. There's one local story that it it it was actually very popular. Among a lot of like lefty folks on Twitter of this like group of dads who showed up to stop, there's like an epidemic of fighting in their school or something and they showed up to do like a community policing or a community self-defense sort of thing. It was celebrated by a lot of folks because it was like, oh hey, this is, you know, a way that communities can protect themselves without cops, yadda yadda yadda. Which is a nice thing to see. It was also celebrated by these people, by by people in this channel and specifically the clip of the news story covering this I found. Was from the Pepe Lives Matter channel, which is, you know, an outright channel like it. And it again, as we were talking about earlier, the Pepe lives isn't all like the way full Nazi pilled stuff, but it shares a lot of stuff from the channels that are straight up Nazis. And so you can you can see already this like lady in her 60s who's probably with some pretty normal boomer three years ago is now 2 steps away from Adam Waffen type *************. That's just the way Telegram works. And they're all kind of bonding over again. This is not a bad story, what these local dads did, but it very much ties into this idea of, like, we got to get all these parents together and take action in the real world, like you. And that's gonna, that's gonna go towards taking action against the people you don't want showing up in your school. Meaning like black children and like children. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. Community, self-defense is great. But also, it really depends on what community is defending itself from. What? So that's a we'll, we'll have to talk about that more at some point in the future. But yeah, another thing I found on that Channel was video this, this I dug into a bit. So there was this video that was claimed to be an ad. It was in fact an ad that Comcast had refused to air. And the video, this, this unaired ad claimed that it was about it was telling the story of a 13 year old girl, Maddie de Garay, who was vaccinated. She was part of a Pfizer trial. And had she claims, like a disastrously bad reaction, an ad about her situation was rejected by Comcast, and this girl like has done the whole right wing in her. I'm I'm guessing her parents are the drivers. Doesn't the whole right wing media kind of circuit at this point? The fact that Comcast banned the ad is what the people in this telegram channel were yelling about. And I want to actually quote from the an article about why Comcast rejected it, because it makes clear what's actually happening here. Comcast. Said to have told the ads buyer it was rejected because it needed substantiation and all graphic images needed to be removed. Documents reportedly submitted for substantiation included the Girls Complete Medical records, which are said to have outlined symptoms such as erratic blood pressure and pulse, muscle spasms, muscle tremors, headaches, brain fog, mixing up words, and the inability to walk and cough. So you've got this case where #1 there's graphic images and #2 there's documentations that this girl has symptoms, but there's not documentation that they're tied in any way to the vaccine. Like, it's just one of these the the Comcast is being careful to not spread unsubstantiated **** about vaccine reactions and stuff. But within the telegram channel, the focus is entirely on like, how this is evidence of this conspiracy to repressing the information. Yeah, suppressing information. One response was why in heavens name don't these parents do their research before having their kids vaccinated? My heart goes out to the precious child and family. What a lesson to learn. There's so many parents, never too late to educate yourselves people. Also I want to point out just the the spelling and the the the emojis in this are incredible amount of emojis. Never never two with one O late to educate your space selfs. It's just again and now I'm doing the they're doing the thing. I'm doing the thing. I tried not to. I did try to give it a straight read through it can be challenging when it's like a it's a very funny it's it's very funny. But I think you know this this is. This, this goes back to the whole point about how this radicalization works, right, which is, you know, you have. Especially with anti VAX stuff that has this sort of larger base from just like regular peer like hard right Nazi stuff. You, you get to see people who you know otherwise probably would be a vaguely normal person very, very quickly get involved, this stuff, and very quickly just go off the deep end. They're not. They're like, yeah, these it is. It's hard to like, say, like, these are all extremists because, like, they themselves aren't extremists. They're surrounded by so much content that is made by extremists that it's making them do these things, which is how, which is how extremism works. Right. But it's it's challenging because, like, when you try to explain this to someone, you're like, no, this is obviously just like a regular grandma or something, right. Yeah. And it's hard to explain to them. How fast this thing can move to the point where they're showing up at a school board with their grandchildren yelling at, like, teachers and stuff. Yeah, and it's not that this lady is a Nazi. It's that this lady can be through the process you just outlined, convinced to stand up next to a Nazi and like. Defend his his right to do violence to people she has been convinced are present, a threat to the lives of her, her grandchildren. Which is, people may say, like the whole like, oh, it's not worth parsing out that much if you're standing next to a Nazi or Nazi. But like, I would argue no, what's actually the the the logistics of what is happening here are much more dangerous than a grandma got radicalized into National socialism. Anyway, another meme I found it was a screen grab from ******* Shawshank redemption. With the Morgan Freeman and I don't know, whatever, one of the white dudes in that movie in prison jumpsuit sitting next to each other, and it's the text on it is what are you in for? I spoke about a school board meeting, which you see see a lot of stuff like this, this idea that they're going to jail, they're going to get raided by the FBI because they're like showing up at school boards to protest vaccine mandates and mask mandates. And then like in the middle of all this stuff, mostly talking about like anti VAX **** there's also this post talking about how this post, that's a video of a woman at a school board talking about how a a book needed to be banned and she's reading it. The book she's reading is a queer memoir and it's about, I'll talk about this more at the end, but you can definitely mention it here because it comes up a lot. It's it's a gay, it's a gay coming of age story, right? And as a result there's a couple of of semi graphic scenes. In it. And she, like, gets up in front of the school board and reads this and argues that it's basically like *********** for children. They think it's child ***********. Yeah. That's what they're marketing. It is mistaking what child *********** is. They're trying to, they're trying to get all the people at the school board either killed or arrested over this. That is that is their goal. And I'll talk about this specific instance later because it keeps coming up with all of these channels. And it's one of the main things that links someone from like, Assad on Red channel to a channel like this. This is Mint Mobile offers premium wireless. Starting at just 15 bucks a month and now for the plot twist? Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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This fall on revisionist history, is there anything that we haven't talked about or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? That's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Anything, particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the main things they've been using the past few weeks, like all this is like current, this is like the past and and this is this though has been going on for a while. You've seen a lot of in like the libertarian right wing, a lot of like kill your local pedophile shirts because who's going to? And a lot most people don't think, like, who's going to defend a pedophile talking about actual pedophiles? Yeah. The proud boy at the Portland School Board who was standing and ready to fight the ready to fight security guards and stuff. He was wearing a kill your local pedophile. Yeah. Yeah. And it's this is this is the thing, this thing the right wing figured out if they figured this out a long time ago. Which is that OK, if if you want to get a bunch of people who are vaguely normal to do like, absolutely horrible violence the way you do it is to tell them that they're threatening kids. Yep. And it doesn't matter. That's why you Anon works so well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and this once and once you've convinced, you know, like this this is, this is just a, I think a very important thing about media messaging in general is that the literally the instant someone says think of the children, you need to stop. And you need to disregard everything they're about to say after that, ideally hit them in the head with a stick. Yeah, like 99.9% of the time, that person is like, about to try to convince you that, like, you need to, like, we need to murder the gays or something like that. That's that. That's the thing that follows from I feel confident saying no one has ever advocated. Thinking of the children and meant anything, but I want to kill this specific group of people just like I. That's not even really hyperbole. It's it's a A tried and true organizing tactic for these people, and it's part of the reason why, like the the famous white nationalist catch phrase is focused around we need to secure a future for white children, right? Like, that's what they're always talking about with all of this ****. And it's it's about being able to demonize a group in a way that they can't be defended. It's about ending any sort of debate or conversation, and it's about justifying thoughtless violence because it's you're protecting children. You know who else protects children, Robert? Definitely not the advertisers of this show, because we are sponsored by Raytheon Brand school bus seeking missiles, the only missiles that only seek school buses. You cannot shoot them at a tank, at A at a technical, at A at a terrorist training camp. They go right through school buses no matter where you aim them. So in that way they're a fire and forget kind of weapon, as long as you're willing to forget anything but hitting a child's school bus with a with a missile. OK, here's here's some ads. Check it out. Alright, yeah, we're back. Still talking about this yeah. So last segment for this episode as we as we as I was talking about there's a post that and and and the post is a video of a woman from a different school board meeting reading out a graphic graphic ish sex scene from this queer memoir and ranting about how it's it's child ***********. Comments include ******* monsters running these schools satanic and disgusting and elementary school unreal. Why aren't charges brought against the school for distributing *********** to minors? Where's it's not even I don't reading it. They could request just a book that's available from some other library, like, because you can request a lot of books at libraries in all caps. Where's the sheriff's? Where are the city, county, state and federal task forces? And uh yeah it's it's talk about this more in the next episode tied to just the overarching anti anti queer, anti trans, anti-gay School Board side of things and of course other things they found. There's like video of them celebrating capital rioters, celebrating Josh Hawley for defending capital rioters. I went into some other channels that were adjacent that I saw shared you know in this channel. One of them was Oscars, midnight writer, Patriot Post Channel, which actually is thousands and thousands of followers. Average post would get two to three. 1000 views here's one I'm considered a domestic terrorist. If I tell a school board that I don't want my 8 year old daughter watching sex videos in her third grade classroom, and that post was right above this post, the Constitution actually says you can legally overthrow your government if they are tyrannical. And that post was right above this post, which was a screen, which was a screen grab from a Twitter account for a guy who calls himself Murray Rothbard. 1776 The FBI didn't raid Epstein Island or protect hundreds of young. Female gymnasts from being sexually assaulted for years, but they'll raid your PTA meetings when you question the curriculum and unscientific mask mandates and their indoctrination camps. I mean public schools. And of course this from a Twitter user named Emerald Robinson. And again, this is all shared in that Channel. It's like a screen grab from Twitter when the FBI starts arresting parents at school board meetings. Just remember the GOP senators who made it happen by confirming Merrick Garland as Attorney General. And then it's a list of Republican emerald. Emerald Robinson is the White House correspondent. News Max. Ohh. Right. Oh my God. Yeah, you're right. Uh-huh. Yep. Great. Great. So I don't know. That's probably all I should get into. Well, no, there's no we can we can go through one more thing. Yeah. So Oscars Midnight Rider, which was shared in in that that school board channel, took me to the Western Chauvinist School board channel, which took me to a post which with a video, with a link to a video. The text with the video was woman at school board meeting, calls out Jewish power by name. And it's a woman ranting about how the Jews are behind all of the critical race theory in schools. So again, not hard to get to this kind of ****. Another post was it was in the Western Chauvinist Telegram. It was sharing a post from the murder, the media telegram, who were part of the capital riot. That post from murdered the media was National School Board Association apology letter for calling you domestic terrorist. It was we'll talk about this later, but the the comment in the Western chauvinist was like, we don't apologize for being. Like for being domestic terrorists like you're yeah we we think it's bad that they called US domestic terrorists because we intravenous channel by the way, has over 50,000 subscribers and used to be a proud boy channel, which is now just a general kind of farther right wing organizing channel that it's probably it's one of the most shared telegram channels in this whole network. And they are really good at creating propaganda that appeals to Trump voters while slipping in a lot of acceleration as talking points. To slowly lead people on that breadcrumb trail to make them be OK with mass violence. There was a comment in there forwarded from another from the Telegram account of a guy named Eric Stryker and this was a post striker made commenting on a video of a father being dragged out of a quote. Woke school board meeting for complaining of complaining about this kind of ****. The the the post from Eric Striker I think is worth reading and I'm going to read it now. For now, all we can do is impotently watch injustices like this unfold. This is really upsetting. We must build our political organization to the point where we can rapidly mobilize to defend this man, including physical demonstrations sent him free legal support, and make people realize that the time of ******* with whites is over. We need our own media, civil society groups and activists. We need money and volunteers. It's not the Republican Party or anything in the conservative movement. It never will be. We need to build it from scratch. We are well underway national Justice Party we must quietly and patiently build. Eventually we will have the capacity to come on the scene when they least expect it, and it will be, and we will be too powerful to stop. And that's probably where we should end for today. Yep, that. That's a good Part 1 ************* good sad intro into the current problem of school board meetings. We'll get into a lot more like accelerating rhetoric in the next bit and then talk about kind of where this stuff originated from and the other other side of things beyond just like the CRT and and and mask stuff because it branches out into a lot of other kind of adjacent culture war ******** issues anyway. Yeah, we'll do that tomorrow. You can follow the show on. Twitter, Instagram, what happened here? Pod and Cool Zone media. If you want to be on those apps, which I don't know why you would. Yeah, don't be on those apps. Get you know I just found out they'll deliver skinned Gators to your door. Get into cooking Gators. I that's what I plan to do. Getting off Twitter and I'm. Gator is the new social network so gay Gator. From cavalry audio comes the new True crime podcast, The Shadow Girls. Wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody, and he started laughing. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer servant, picking up his girls, getting him in a position of vulnerability. When he got ahold of their neck. That was it. I'm Carolyn Ossorio, a journalist and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. How many times did you bring the camera to? One time. Fantasizing about having sex with his mother. Then he fantasized about killing her. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go into the woods. Kind of strange. You know how he feels about prostitutes. 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What's second, my part of this episode on right wing attempts to attack and dominate school board meetings in order to further their ability to do violence on marginalized groups and also erode democratic institutions from the ground. Catchy title, yeah, yeah, that'll that'll click well. I'm so glad we don't have to worry about clicking and titles. And that took up a lot of my mind back in the day, Garrison, back when, back when the Internet was different. Now we don't have to worry about that anymore, but what we do have to worry about are mobs of fascists attacking school board meetings. Yeah, it happens every week. Keeps happening more often. School boards are calling for assistance. They seem pretty. They seem pretty. Not thrilled. Yeah, they seem not psyched about uh. All that? Yep. So where, where, where? When we left off, I was talking about some things I found on the Graham Telegram. Garrison, what's next? I'll, I'll go into my preliminary research on telegram and particularly response. Basically, I looked through every single telegram post and all of the main fascist channels I lurk on that mentioned the school boards from like the past two weeks. So like, yeah, this is like current, current stuff on ongoing. I got to a lot of the channels I was already familiar with. Like, you know, the Western. This channel is 50,000 Subs. The Stanford Students Channel, which is the one I was less familiar with specifically dedicated to this school board issue. One of the posts I we have on there is says your enemy isn't some far off shithole country. Your enemy is just down the street at your local school board meeting teaching your kids to hate their ancestors, you and themselves. So like again, that is a very much white supremacist dog whistle just right there. Of talking about producing Hollywood movies, writing the not even really a dog whistle. No. They're basically, it's basically just a whistle. Yeah. So yeah. They then they, you know, the same post talks about, you know, masks and shutting down businesses and their vaccines and stuff and saying the fight is here and the fight is now. So just in terms of like, yeah, they're really wanting to hype people up for doing this thing at school boards. They're trying to really hammer down the school board point. So, like, I I found this. I found this post. This is this is a post from the Stanford Students channel. And I saw this one reshared in a lot of different channels and one of the other first ones that I saw pop off was from Ron Watkins Channel a code Monkey Z. He is one of the one of the architects or one of the you know people who really pushed Q Anon stuff into. He's he's the guy who ran like the the physical infrastructure of Nate Change 8 Chan and eight coin for years. Yeah he and he's trying to pivot into being like having his just his face be like a kind of alternative right wing figure right now. He's gonna be running for office in Arizona, I believe. Anyway, he has a very popular telegram channel and he he made he made this post that had over 1000 / 1000 comments on it, which is a lot for Telegram 1000 comments on telegram posts, especially telegram post of it's a lot of code's size, I don't see how many subjects. So Ron, just as context, Ron Watkins has 432,000 subscribers on his on his telegram channel, so. Yep yeah. Anyway CRT is being rebranded as SELA Social emotional learning. If you are attending school board meetings as you should be, do what you can to make sure you stop both SEL and CRT and keep them and make sure that they are banned in your school districts. So again, just direct calls to action for getting people to show up to these school boards. And also social emotional learning is not CRT and of course CRT. They even taught in schools. I think everyone who listens to this podcast knows that CRT actually critical race theory isn't taught in schools. This isn't an actual thing, it's it is like a legal theory. We'll get into more of how this got like pushed towards the end. I think Chris has some stuff prepared on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's none of these things are actually real. It's a complex legal theory. What they're really mad about is they're people are teaching that racism is like an issue that's built into a lot of American institutions and it's an ongoing thing. It's not a thing of the past. That's what they're actually mad about and they just call that. Charity some some of the comments from the Ron Rockins Post. Stuff like these snowflakes are so annoying. I'm about to start cutting power to any school in my community that teaches this. Great. So, yeah, more again, that's just a direct, direct drive doing terrorism. I mean less of a threat and more of a a promise. Yeah. Does that make it better? No, it sure doesn't. Alright, well, I don't understand things the same way you zoomers do. Please continue. Yeah, a lot of a lot of posts being shared around from channel to channel including this full naughty channels were like trying to trying to of course, like lots of Nazis are actually. You know. Thought it was pretty funny that the that the school board union put in a call to assistance to the federal government to deal with this issue. They of course thought it was funny. But they're going to use this to like spread into networks to be like, hey, the government wants to stop you. They're calling you a terrorist. You like regular folk are being called terrorists because you're going to school boards, right? That's the kind of message that they're going to shoot out. So they a lot of Nazi channels crafted a lot of posts like that that got shared around a lot. Yeah, in trying to basically all time critical race theory and you know, if you approached against critical race theory, they're calling you a domestic terrorist. That that type of thing. And this guy, this got shared in like the school boards channel and a whole bunch, a whole bunch of other stuff. Being being talking about how if if you if you stand up you're going to be a domestic terrorist. You have to be brave and do this a few days after the school board, not a few days. I guess. This was this was in like in October the school association retracted some of the some of the words that they used in their letter because of this backlash that was created and this was also shared in Sheridan. Lots of fascist channels. The main one, it was Sheridan that I saw was the honk Pilled channel. Which is just another type of Pepe meme. One of the other one of the other big big kind of groups active in this. In this whole sphere, and this has been a group going on for a while that we haven't talked about on the pod, but we probably should do something eventually, is this group called White Rose? So this is a White Rose is a COVID conspiracy group that has been very successful in creating on the ground organizers who are regular people and they do a lot of like sticker bombs and lots of neighborhoods. If you have. If you ever seen anti like COVID or COVID conspiracy stickers in your neighborhood, it was probably a White Rose sticker. These are all over the States and basically everything. As a quick heads up the original White Rose was a student protest organization that existed in Nazi Germany. Yeah and protested illegally and its organizers were executed by the Nazis and I think it was the mid 40 I mean would have like 43 maybe maybe 44. Sophie Scholl was the the person most associated with them. So they they're they're they've taken the name of the names of these these heroes in order to. It's just disgusting. It's very gross. There's there's a decent amount of decent amount of researchers in this field thinks that there's, like, actual bad people behind White Rose. Of course, like bad people, they're getting COVID stuff. But like, like, wait, like, like, more like bad actors use, basically astroturfing this thing. But White Rose deserves its own piece later. But because they have such a big following on telegram, they are of course using using this to using the school board thing to gain more support. They have about 50,000 subscribers to their specific. Telegram channel they they they should have posted a few weeks ago saying thank you to all the brave parents going out to their school boards and standing up for the children. And they they try to, you know, get people to do sticker bombs and stuff. But the fact that there's like specifically calling out people in school boards is like an an extra step of like beyond just putting stickers up in your neighborhood. Another another another white White Rose post they shared a shared a video. That was captioned as concerned. Parent absolutely destroys school board with facts. The school boards are the battlefield of our time. This is how it's done and just the increasing rhetoric around like, battlefields. This is where like, the fight is at. All that kind of stuff. There was another the white white chauvinist channel shared a video from Fox News and they they the Western Chauvinist channel, which is again, it's one of the most shared ones in this whole network. They captioned this saying parents in Virginia are trying to fight back against the school board that is anti white. Every, every school district in America needs to have an anti mandate pro right parents running for the school board so that's just the It's this type of stuff all over this this this post was. But it has like 1111 thousand 11,000 views. So these things are spreading to a lot of a lot of these specific networks. And I mean, I, I have so many of this kind of stuff, I'm not going to go through every single one in detail. There's ones that are way more like openly anti-Semitic, you know, saying, you know, the Jews that run, you know, X school board are trying to force vaccinations on every student over 12 other another, there's this fake, there's this, there's this fake Clint Eastwood channel on telegram that's pretty popular. Someone who's pretending to be Clint Eastwood to that makes sense. All right. If he had a post that was shared a lot that started by saying starts taking over school boards start taking over City Council, start taking over city boards, start start being poll watchers, start being poll workers, start taking over sheriff's departments. It's not enough just to vote. So this this is the other thing that we're going to see a lot more of is rhetoric around voting isn't enough. You need to start doing more things. There is one of it, yeah. Here here's here's one this is going to, this is referencing some of like the trans stuff. I'll discuss in a bit. I just want to tie it in now. Of a post from the Western Chauvinist Channel saying there is no political solution, which is a a direct Nazi. A direct Nazi lie. I mean that that's what I did. An article early this year on Riley Williams, the Nazi who stole Pelosi's laptop during the capital riot. And then, like the video that we were able to identify her as a SIG heiling Nazi. And that's how she opened her quote. There is no political solution. It's a very common catch phrase among like the. The flash write, yeah. So there's been a lot of stuff around harassing like specific school board members, harassing specific teachers. There was this teacher in, I think in California that was trying to like introduce like like anti fascist type rhetoric and talking about how fascism is a modern thing. They got absolutely bashed and like docks and they got it, I think fired because there was like hundreds of of parents organizing on, on apps like Telegram to harass this one teacher at school boards that, you know, they they took over massive school board meetings and just talked about this one. Sure, endlessly. And it was, it was interesting. Like, all the parents were like, yeah, like, my I I got worried because my student actually really liked the teacher and said that they were doing, like, giving really interesting points about, like, systemic issues. And the parents were like, and they like, brought their kids to the school board meetings. The kids are just standing in the back as their parents are ranting about this and talking about how the kids actually, like, thought they were learning things about systemic issues. And then that got people mad. So you know what else gets people mad? Of the advertisements, yeah. And we're bad. We're gonna, we're gonna touch on the the specifics, like all the stuff we've been talking about most of the modern. Most most of like, the current organizing is a lot of it's around like mask mandates and vaccine mandates, like all of this, like all like, you know, the the, the school board channel, all of this kind of stuff is usually around vaccine, vaccines and mask stuff. Of course, there's critical race theory was the way more popular thing a few months ago. Right now it's a vaccine thing. The other kind of like ever present thing is. Uh, being upset that trans kids exist and being very fearful that that there are trans kids around your kids. This is the thing that's been, you know, a thing for years that people have been fighting against. And since the school board thing is becoming more popular, people are are starting to. During basically do these kind of flash mobs specifically around trans issues, one of like the more like astroturf type things was people getting mad that there were like 2 specific books available in certain high school and some middle school libraries that one of it was like a like one of it was the memoir that Robert mentioned, the other one was like a graphic novel memoir about someone realizing their gender queer. So these are books are not in curriculums, these are just books that are available. At the library and basically there was people who who found these out and got turned it into like, like a meme on Telegram, essentially like people like sharing information about this. Then you like look it up, see if it's in your library. So then we have all of these, like coordinated attacks on school boards by these lots of people all about these same two books. And the goal is to not only just get the books like banned, but they're also trying to like fire or arrest the teachers and school board members for allowing these books to happen. There has been school members who have like. Down because it just how much harassment is about these things. Quote from the Western chauvinist Channel Jesus Christ straight up pedophile books in our children's schools. Once again, the Jewish School board member gets mad and tries to shut them down. How can you not connect the dots here? There's no political solution. Voting will not remove these people. There was the mayor of Houston, so in the mayor of Houston, Ohio heard about this and he went to a school board meeting and instructed all of them, all of the board members to resign. Quoting the quoting the proud boy right wing organizing channel, Western chauvinist. This comes after some of the degenerate parasites in the system called educators instructed kids to describe a sex scene that they wouldn't show their mom. Of course this didn't happen. This is, this is the these these things are not, are not. These books are not used in any kind of curriculum anyway. So even even if they were that that that we would not even we're not even in that reality. So the the mayor of this town basically got these instructed these instructed all these people to resign earlier I think in March no in August of of this year's pride flags were banned at A at a school school district inside a SW Oregon. I think around I think around Newberg the the Newburgh School district banned. But Ben pride flags. So all of this kind of stuff and of course that is in a lot of states. But the, again, the fact that it's in like Oregon, a blue state is people got me like, you know, there's like, you know, NBC articles about it because it's it's Oregon. It's not, it's, it's not, it's it's not a red state. So it's all big, it's all Portland. It's all antifa. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So again, this stuff is not, not not like contained to one thing and like, yeah, if you Google the, the stuff around these books, if you Google like gender queer book school boards. You'll find this in so many school districts. You'll see just mobs of people lined up yelling and screaming and like, like, printing out giant, like giant cardboard prints of of this comic book showing like, like with like, you know, there's like * **** on it. Like there's like a drawn, a drawn **** because that's what human bodies look like. Like you can look at like a lot of like, yeah, like what? You know, ban the statue of David because he has *** **** out too. Like, like, come on. Like, these are the same people who talk about, like, oh, they're, you know, banning books, burning books. You know, right there was that, there was that tweet from like, James Woods about like, these are the books that people want banned. That means the most important ones. But these people love. These people love, like, burning books. These people love banning books. They love cancel culture. They the cultures that I was, that I was in as a kid, they would have like massive, like book and like CD and DVD burnings for like, unlike unholy and sinful media that you would like bring in and like, throw like your sinful music onto this giant. Fire like these people love love burning books they love, they love banning stuff. They love cancel culture. That they just lie about it. Yeah. So that was, that was most of my stuff around the kind of the ongoing queer and trans stuff, of course, you know this Tyson like bathroom stuff, as well as the people showing up to school board meetings to scream about, you know, kids going **** in the bathroom that they want to and feel comfortable in. You know, and again, like, it doesn't, it's not going to stop with trans people either, right? As soon as they ban trans people, the next thing is going to be, oh, gay students, right? This is never, it's never stops. It always keeps going. And it's just an ever present problem that is going to require a lot more, a lot more dealing with. And again, with all of these flash mobs, like no one, no one's going to stop them because they're like the people in power. They're the people that have all of the privilege. There's no really effective counter organizing for these school board meetings right now. Cops are going to do **** security guards aren't going to do **** and regular libs and regular, regular people aren't going to do **** either. And it's hard to figure out how to actually combat this because there's a lot of times that the people in the school boards be like, no, we don't want this to turn into a giant like fistfights. Like don't don't come in mass to start fist fighting them. But there needs to be something to combat, whether that be, you know, running, running for school boards, just showing up outside school boards, having just more people there in having more presence there. So that it's not as overwhelmed by like a mob of 200 anti mask people showing up right? There needs to be some type of. Thing happening because no one else. It needs to be countered and yet you know what? They might need to get the **** kicked out of them. I'm sorry but like I don't like I don't think that would actually help in this instance probably. But like there needs to be ******* something like they they are the the the level of boldness that they have is evidence that they they feel they they are confident that there is no counter to what there is going to be done and perhaps if they were being met by a wall. Of people in the community who were willing, if they tried to force their way into ******* throw down. You know, to say you're not entering this building without a *** **** mask, you're not shutting down this meeting. Umm, I don't know, maybe that would do something. I don't actually know what would do something. I think it was like worked, but if it was people just as regular people, I think that would be yeah, it's certainly not going to help if it's Antifa for the love of God, don't show up and ******* black bloc at a school board meeting. Like what would work is a bunch of other middle-aged parents showing up and being willing to confront these people. Physically and and and like everything that is worth mentioning is that a lot of the people at these protests like are not parents at all. Like, they're not, they're not from the same school district. They're just sort of like this. This is just how the this is just how the sort of right wing outrage machine has worked and this is where they're drawing people. Yeah, I mean again, like it's it's a lot of the people in there, there's going to be big dudes who want to fight. But a lot of the people like screaming are are like, you know, middle-aged women, the people who are like really like leading the charge on this because they're able to use their privilege and because like, no one's going to stop them, right. So that's like when they're leading the charge of like 200 people who are going to like scream and harass and chase out black security guards, chase out, chase out the all this, all the school board members, no one. They're they're very. Effective at using their privilege to gain political ground by just like doing stuff on the ground. It's like, you know, it's like, it's like the January 6th thing. It's like the January 6th thing. This is the new future of political action is just showing up in mass two places where no one's going to stop you because you're like, you're the, you know, the good, relatable, you know, everyday thing. Yeah. Anyway, that's that's the stuff I had. Will probably have an ad break and then talk about maybe some of how this stuff started Speaking of. Using your privilege, you know what is the greatest privilege? Being able to purchase the products that yeah, that's exactly right. There's no privilege higher than being able to engage with these consumables. And we're back. All right. Chris, you wanna close this out? Yeah. So the last thing I wanna talk about that is interesting about this whole thing is, you know, we, we've, we've been mostly been focusing on the, the very furthest right elements of this, but a lot of the school board stuff. Is tied to, I mean, just straight up Republican Party operatives and people who work in this sort of, you know, I mean there's there's literally a bunch of people who work for Republican Party. We'll get into it. There's also this sort of network of of Republican think tanks, Republican sort of dark money dumps that a lot of a lot of astroturf groups and that kind of stuff. Yeah. And and so I want to talk about a few of these people because I think they're interesting. I think we can start with Nicole Nelly, who's interesting person she's so she, she most recently founded parrots defending education, who were. They're one of the big groups to sort of like spreads this, this sort of attack on school board stuff over the country. They have chapters, they organize people and they also, you know, they do this thing where they collect incident reports from from school districts that they, you know, distribute to all these people and they put it online, they have all of these. I they they they they they have a lot of stuff they do they they do a lot of anti mask mandate stuff. So they have these like template letters like template like fake platform and letter things that you can send to schools that if you don't wear masks that is the. That's a staple of this type of organizing. Yeah yeah and and the interesting thing about Nelly is that so this is not like her first org like three years. So in 2018 back in the the the halcyon days of of. I. You know, I, I'm. I'm not going to say it was before the mask fully came off but it was while the mask was like a little bit more on. She she previously founded a speech first. Yeah. You might remember. Yeah. As the Republic back when free speech was the big talking point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So she ran that for a while. Now she's you know, organizing with the people who just wants to ban. Yeah. They just move on. They move on to the new things. It was it was free speech. It was critical race theory. Right now it's anti mask stuff. Next up is going to be trans. Going real hard, just today we had the ******* the person who BBC platformed the the ******* like, yeah, Lily Cade the ******. Lily Cade wrote a whole manifesto where she details which specific trans women she wants to personally kill. I I used to know Lily. Ohh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Real dark turn. I don't know. I guess it's not super surprising. She was a definite. I interviewed her for a documentary and it was she was a bit off putting. Didn't realize this was going on. I mean, yeah, there's there's a lot of a lot, a lot of reports of people in like the sex work industry of talking about her, like ****** people in bathrooms. But again, it's like, yeah, the people it's always concerning about, Oh no, trans women are in bathrooms. The people, the person screaming about this is an actual ******. Yeah, like, like when we say ****** here, like she she she raped so many people that, like, on Twitter, like, I was scrolling through my feed and I saw multiple people who were like, oh, I know this person. She assaulted me. Yeah, it's real bad. The people who the turfs are, like, pushing. BC was platform here so like yeah like trans stuff is as soon as as soon as the anti mask anti VAX stuff like dies down in the next and they're five months or whatever. I I foresee a massive pivot towards specifically anti anti trans, anti queer, anti-gay stuff because that's going to be the the the new thing and and and and I think it's worth bearing in mind that this stuff yeah and you know with the Colonel specifically. So she she worked she like worked at the Cato Institute which is like Murray Rothbard and Charles Cokes now it's it's hey, yeah, it's it's it's it's basically, this is a slight oversimplification, but it's basically one of the Cokes, sort of like money laundering like yeah, money operation things. She also worked at Freedom Works. Who? Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah, this is great. So this is, this is one of the fun parts of this, which is that. So Freedom Works is another one of the Cokes, sort of dark money laundering machine things. And freedom works are basically the people who created the Tea Party, like the people who turned the Tea Party from like a bunch of weird guy just like like 6 weirdos into like, you know, the, the basically the, the, the, the, the, the, the entirety of the pre Trump conservative political machine who like you built Republican Party after it was like completely discredited. In the 2000s, yeah. And this is true of a lot of the people who are in charge of these big orgs have connections like this. The the the person you founded. No left turn, which is no left turn. Yeah, no left turn. Education there. Another one of these big sort of anti school board things. I mean they they're the people, they're one of people who like, they have a list of books on their website they want banned. Wow. Yeah, it's great. And their founder writes for the heritage foundations like magazine. So. There, there, there's, there's all of this stuff. And I think maybe the most emblematic one is this guy is Mark Ruffalo. Who. Yeah. ******* rufo. Yeah. So so he he's he's the guy who just created the whole critical race theory thing out of nothing. He, like, threw together a bunch of like, just like these incredibly tenuous connections, like there's a bunch of sort of old. Cultural Marxism conspiracy stuff in there. Yeah. It's a lot of like Frankfurt school type ****. Yeah. Yeah. And and but what I think is interesting about him is less his ideas, which are just pseudo intellectual. Yeah, he doesn't. He's not actually super smart in what he says. There's a lot of videos of him talking to actual philosophers, getting schooled about what critical race theory is like. He's actually not that intelligent in this, in this side of things. But, but, you know, The thing is there's nothing more dangerous than an idiot with a trick up his sleeve. Exactly. And you know. And the, the, the the trick basically is Fox News and you know the reason the reason this whole thing exists is that this was, you know, Mark Ruffo. He he's very, very explicit about this this this this was his solution to the the the George Floyd Uprising. Yeah. Was that, oh, we we need we need to we need to find this thing to start through a medium of this uprising. And this is this is Tucker Carlson brings on, starts bringing on 2020 and this blows up. He immediately gets hired by the Manhattan Institute, which is a very not that old, but they're from the 80s but a very sort of an old extremely powerful conservative think tank that I don't think. I think it's less known than things like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute. Yeah, I would say so, yeah. But he, he gets, they hire him, like, immediately because, you know, the, the, the, the, the sort of mainline of the Republican Party very quickly is like, this is the thing that we can use as like a hammer, right. And so the Manhattan Institute publishes this roof. I work for them now. I can't. I'm not actually sure if you. I don't know if you specifically wrote this or he was just involved in it. It it's it's the byline is just a Manhattan institute, but they have this incredibly detailed toolkit explaining how you know both explaining what the sort of right wing like. Lying on critical race theory is they have, like, a bunch of explainers have lists of terms. If you ever seen massive. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually, yeah. If you've ever seen, like, list of terms people want banned, like, it's all just pulled from this document, right. So we'll add stuff. But the interesting part about this is the other thing is this. This is an organizing manual, right? It's it's a difficult thing that tells you how to go and how to find other people like other other people. You know, if you're like an incensed right wing, like freaking out of the school districts, it's like, OK, well, here's, here's how you, like, talk to other people in your district. Here's a list of options of like things you can do going public, and then there's a very interesting thing part of this that that I think is. Really disturbing and outliers like really what's going on here? Which is there's this whole like freak out thing about this thing called minority rule where like oh the left has this like they have this like militant minority that will compel the majority to follow them by because they, they they keep on showing up. They keep on doing things and if they if this minority like. It keeps keep, keeps I, you know, being more transient than everyone else, then they will inevitably win. And this 3/4 of this section is this like weird fear mongering thing about it. But then the last part of it is a bunch is a thing as saying, oh, we need to do this ourselves, right. This is how we win. We win by being more intransigent. We win by showing up more often. Yeah, of course, yeah. And you know, and this is, this is the other thing is this is from like last year. I think, I think this is like, the toolkit is this summer? Yeah. OK sorry, this is, this is this is really this. But it's interesting because it's like. This is the sort of, you know this this is this is the Republican Party essentially. I mean that institutes very, very mature Republican Party. This is this is this is how they do effective in person organizing. We talked about this a bit in our episodes about the like in the aftermath of the abortion ruling in Texas and how and how like the religious right wing organizing has worked in local districts. Yeah this this is how they were able to get things done. Which is why there's been so many school members who either got fired, who had to step down, who have been harassed off the job. And are now there's people, you know a lot of a lot of like people I would describe as people holding very extreme views are now running and taking these spots because if you can do, if you can do this type of, like, again, it's not grassroots, but it's it's it is it is like Astroturf. So like it appears grassroots. But if you do this type of like faux grassroots organizing, you can gain a lot of power over specific areas and make a lot of peoples lives a lot more miserable. And that's that. That's what the goal is, right? The goal is to make trans kids lives miserable. The goal is to get people. To not wear masks and die of COVID like that, those are the results of these actions. Well, I I think, I think that there's an interesting interplay here, though, because I think because so freedom works like, like, even even a lot of the specific protests that are happening. And this is especially true of of the very earlier, earliest ones, I think. Like when when like the very first school board protests that were happening. Yeah, like like a lot of these somewhere to fall of 2020 was when they started to start up. And those a lot of those were directly organized by by people who work for freedom. OK. And and this is this is a lot of the CRT ones. Yeah. Yeah. This is the CRT ones. Yeah. Very specifically freedom works and and this is what I think is interesting about this is that, you know, OK freedom works. OK. So what does freedom works out of this freedom works wants the Tea Party again. Right. Because you know this is this is what freedom Works does, right. They're they're they're they're basically the group that comes in when the when the Republicans start losing election cycles they're like, OK well now we need to get the balance of power back. We need to draw the Democrats out. So they're they're they're largely trying to build a sort of electoral base and and again like this this will look familiar to people who remember. 2010 because it's the same thing, except. And this is the thing that I this is the part where I genuinely can't tell whether the freedom works people, whether the coaches, whether that, whether this sort of dark money network. Either. I don't. I can't tell whether they understand what they're doing and like it or they're just incredibly naive. But you know this is not 2010, right? You can't when when you start mobilizing people like mobilizing people on the right wing to go to a place they don't just, like, sit there and hold signs anymore. You cannot, you cannot contain them at this point. You cannot control the spread like you have once you've you've opened this can. And there's no way of putting them back in. Because as soon as they start organizing on apps like Telegram, there are one step away from skull masks, and then they're being OK with cheering along. People that are gonna go beat up the that are going to go beat up people in these meetings. Yeah and this is this is this is really the thing that I think it's not just January 6th we live in the shadow January sick but it's also about you know if you look at how how the anti lockdown protest went in in in 2020, right you have people showing up with guns the capitals. Yeah and that stuff was extremely effective and that and the combination between that and January 6 has you know it's opened the floodgates and now that was that was what led to January 6 being possible. It's the more protests. Around capitals with people showing up in mass to overwhelm anyone and because they're all white and because they're all like middle class conservatives and was going to stop them. Yeah. And and you know, and this is the thing, right, you know, the the, the Cokes. I I I genuinely don't know what the Kochs want out of this. My guess is that the thing that they want is is a new base Republican voters. But that's not what they're creating. The thing they're creating is a new core of Fascist Street fighters. And Yep, you know it, it it. At some point it doesn't. It literally doesn't matter whether or not this is what the coaches are trying to do, like not trying to do because they're in the end, it's it's just pushing people towards thinking there's no political solution. It's still the it's only only violence. And overwhelming people in mass is the only way to get the change that they want. The change they want is to have trans kids not exist. And yeah, just more, more and more like fascistic policies, whether that be, you know. Banning books that mention gay people existing or what it's like to be a gay person, whether that be teaching people that racism is still an actual thing that exists or that be putting a mask on so you don't kill your grandma or whatever. You know, I think one last thing, right, is, you know, we saw what happened last time they were in power, right? And it was, you know, and like, yeah, you can, you can talk about how a lot of the worst stuff is still happening was like, yeah, they they put a bunch of people in concentration camps, right? And if they, if they take back power again and there's a good chance that they're going to because, you know, the Democrats are being they, they, they, they, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Democrats never want to be in power. The thing they want to be is now the minority opposition so they can do fundraising right. And if you know, when, when, when these people, if these people take power again, it's going to be even worse than it was last time. Yeah, the thing looking at, looking at the Virginia election the night of recording is a great example of that. In terms of yeah, it turns out when Democrats just do nothing and just sit around in office, you don't convince young people to want to vote for them because they're not actually doing anything. So then they just sit out. Then the Republicans actually do vote in people. Then we get a we anti CRT person elected to be the Governor of Virginia and that's the episode. Good times. Well, I hope everybody's optimistic, feeling nice. Well, we'll be back with something else. Research your school boards who's in it and protests around it and maybe show up with some of your, I don't know, buddies with your lattes and stand in front of the building and be like, no, we don't want you. We don't want you to shut stuff down because no one else is going to stop them. It has to be just like regular people. You can't going to be the cops. It's not going to be any elected Democrat. Honestly. Like you can't rely on teens and black bloc to do this. That's this isn't. This isn't what they need to be doing. It should be. Like, yeah, it'd be like, millennials and Gen X need to be like, hey, no, we're not going to, we're not going to have you doing this. Well, that's the end. That's the episode. That's the episode. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for. It could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com/sources. Thanks for listening. The art world. It is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed, and forgery in the art world. I just walked in and saw this bright red painting presuming to be a Rothko. Of course, art forgeries only happen because there's money to be made. A lot of money. I'm listening to how what they're paying for these things. It was an incredible amount of money. 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